GMO's and Drugs

Buried in an article on the experimental drug cocktail given to the Ebola patients is the information that the contents of the cocktail derive from genetically modified tobacco plants.  Tobacco has attracted a lot of research interest, partly to find an alternate use instead of cigarettes and partly because it has characteristics which make it adaptable to producing proteins in its leaves (my memory of the science--likely to be inaccurate).

This raises a question for those foodies who diss GMO food: will you also diss GMO drugs?  Seems to me the arguments against both are the same. The possibility of harm to humans from something new.

A Blast From the Past--Price-Gouging on Rail Cars

Back in the 1800's farmers complained bitterly about freight rates charged by the railroads.  There was some justice to the rails' pattern, but because farmers depended so much on the rails to get harvests to market, any exploitation was too much. The result was our first independent regulatory commission, the ICC (Interstate Commerce Commission) and a strong impulse to the populist movement.

Fast forward to today, and this excerpt from Farm Policy:

What’s more, rail car rates than ran $300 to $400 a car a year ago have ballooned to $3,000 to $3,500 now, he says [Jerry Lehnert]. Eventually, those excess costs get passed on in bids, eroding farm incomes in the process.”

Not a Good Morning for Farmers in the Post

Two articles in the Washington Post: the toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie is blamed on runoffs of fertilizer and manure; the increase in "intersexed fish" in the Chesapeake over the years is blamed on runoffs of fertilizer and manure.  (An interseced

Is This Really True? Football

"Nowadays if you're 6' 3" and 280 pounds, you're too big for most skill positions and too small to play line."  Via Marginal Revolution, from a graphic showing changes in weight and height over the years.

Duplicative Payments and Management's Use of People and Money

GAO has a report on duplicative payments by USDA farm agencies. Basically, they found a lot of overlap (producers getting benefits from multiple programs) but not a whole lot of duplication (producers getting benefits from multiple programs for the identical cause, such as loss of production). They did recommend data matching in cases where duplication is possible, but RMA and FSA pushed back, arguing lack of resources. 

Bottom line: even though the taxpayer would gain if they identified the duplication (because the cost would be less than the money to be refunded, assuming there was 100 percent collection) it doesn't make sense to managers.  Assuming managers are good and rational, they see a bigger bang for the personnel and IR bucks in other areas.  The answer is to allow the agencies to keep  part of their collections, but that's not something likely to happen.

Harshaw's Corollary of Parkinson's Law

According to Parkinson's Law:

"work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion"

Or, as generalized since Mr. Parkinson first described it,

"The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource"

In this light, I've Harshaw's corollary: 

 "books expand to overfill available bookshelves"

Of course, this is time-limited--books are a vanishing breed. 

Harshaw's Rule of Appropriations

Based on earmarks, block grants, and general experience, I venture to say:

"the more general the appropriation, the more likely to be; the more specific the appropriation the safer from cuts"*

* unless and until the sole Congressional sponsor leaves Congress.

For example, if Congress inserts a particular line item to buy a weapon, a plane or tank, that's pretty immune from being cut; if they appropriate $10 billion for training, that's going to be cut.

The American Food Is Meat

America may or may not have been born a Christian nation, but it was surely born a meat-eating nation.  Consider this quote from a German who lived in Pennsylvania around 1750:

Even in the humblest and poorest houses in this country there is no meal without meat, and no one eats the bread without butter or cheese

It's from a short book he wrote upon returning to Germany. Here's some highlights

The "Halo" Effect

Some recent research found that umpires give pitchers who've been named to one or more All Star teams a bigger strike zone than journeymen.  I seem to recall some other research which backed the conventional wisdom: in the NBA the big names, the all-stars, get the breaks on referee's calls--charging, blocking, traveling, etc.

Let's call this the "halo effect".  I wonder whether it's the converse of racism? The great and good can do no wrong, the small and mean can do no right?  When actually living is just putting one foot after another, sometimes misstepping, sometimes not.

A Reality Check for the Food Movement?

Mark Bittman says French cuisine has gone to les chiens.  Years ago some French farmer achieved fame by attacking a McDonalds.  And French government policy has been to subsidize the smaller farmer. The fact that these measures don't seem to have worked should tell the food movement something about the difficulty of moving beyond a niche catering to the better off.  Should but won't.

How Soon We Forget, Even Ag Ec Profs

From Farm Policy, discussing the ending of direct payments:

“‘The fundamental political problem that direct payments ran into is a question of fairness,’ said Carl Zulauf, an agricultural economist at Ohio State University. ‘Is it fair farmers were receiving these payments when income was at record or near-record levels? We as a country decided that was not something we felt comfortable with.’”

The article [in the Toledo Blade] stated that, “Direct payments were included in the 1996 Farm Bill as a temporary safeguard against bad years, but eventually became permanent. The subsidies drew heavy fire recently as farm income rose to record levels. Mr. Zulauf said as long as farmers met the basic qualifications, direct payments were made regardless of need. In the new system, payments will only be made when certain market conditions exist — either revenue declines or low market prices for grain and other commodities.

Of course, as everyone knows, at least those of a certain age, direct payments replaced deficiency payments in 1996 as the Republicans' means of phasing out farm programs, except it didn't work.

Our Great Democratic ex-President

Jimmy Carter and his center have, with others, almost eradicated guinea worm.

Note that education and clean water were the keys.

What Is "Genetically Modified"?

The most familiar GMO crops are those which have genes added to provide resistance to a herbicide, or to fight some disease or pest.  The anti-GMO people argue this is messing with mother nature, when you add a gene to corn which comes from some other organism, and that such messing is dangerous.  I don't agree, but I can understand why someone might think that way.

But now comes a report that Chinese scientists have genetically modified wheat to improve its resistance to powdery mildew. What strikes me is the method used: deleting  genes that encode proteins that repress defenses against the mildew.  To me, this undermines the anti-GMO argument--you aren't creating a Frankenstein's monster by combining parts from different organisms, you're simply streamlining an organism.

I suspect few anti-GMO types will agree with me.

[Update: this was a very early use of what is now familiar to most: CRISPR.  I give myself kudos for seeing this and noting the difference with standard genetic modification so early.  Sept. 10, 2018]

Words of Wisdom from Kevin Drum

Towards the end of a rant (Kevin rants? yes) against Thomas Frank's new article on Obama:

"All of us who do what Thomas Frank does—what I do—have failed. Our goal was to persuade the public to move in a liberal direction, and that didn't happen. In the end, we didn't persuade much of anyone. It's natural to want to avoid facing that humiliating truth, and equally natural to look for someone else to blame instead. That's human nature. So fine. Blame Obama if it makes you feel better. That's what we elect presidents for: to take the blame.

But he only deserves his share. The rest of us, who were unable to take advantage of an epic financial collapse to get the public firmly in favor of pitchforks and universal health care, deserve most of it. The mirror doesn't lie."

Handling Emails, Tweets, and Chats

FCW has an article on government failures in handling e-communications of all sorts.  It confirms my previous post about problems in ASCS/FSA.

Bittman and Blah on Cheeseburger Freedom

From a Mark Bittman post at the Times:

If those externalities were borne by their producers rather than by consumers and society at large, the industry would be a highly unprofitable, even silly one. It would either cease to exist or be forced to raise its prices significantly.

In this discussion, the cheeseburger is simply a symbol of a food system gone awry. Industrial food has manipulated cheap prices for excess profit at excess cost to everyone; low prices do not indicate “savings” or true inexpensiveness but deception. And all the products of industrial food consumption have externalities that would be lessened by a system that makes as its primary goal the links among nutrition, fairness and sustainability.

That's the concluding sentences of an argument that industrial ag, as symbolized by the cheeseburger, has very costly externalities: it has a big carbon footprint, it contributes to obesity, obesity contributes to poor health, plus a handful of more minor effects. I've no problem with Bittman's pointing out the negative externalities, but I do have two problems with the piece:

• First, if you're going to discuss externalities, fairness means you need to talk about positive ones as well.  The cheeseburger is one of the great American contributions to the cause of freedom.  It frees women to do something other than cook 3 meals a day, as my mother did.  Whether it's to pursue a career or just to get a second income for the family, that freedom, that ability to choose is important.  (Obviously men and children also gain more freedom, more choice as well, but women are the greatest gainers.)
• Second, I find these words simply incoherent: "Industrial food has manipulated cheap prices for excess profit at excess cost to everyone".  I defy anyone to expand the statement in a way which makes sense.

I'm a Whippersnapper??

Via University Diaries, Pew has a political typology quiz, which says based on my answers:

Generally young, well-educated and financially comfortable, the Next Generation Left have very liberal attitudes on many issues, including homosexuality, abortion, the environment and foreign policy. While overall supportive of an activist government, most are wary of expanding the social safety net. Most also have relatively positive views of Wall Street’s impact on the economy. While most affiliate with the Democratic Party or lean Democratic, few consider themselves strong Democrats. Compare groups on key issues.

 As usual, you're offered two choices on each question and I'd view most of them as a continuum, not binary.

Rules on Nondiscrimination at USDA

Thanks to Farm Policy, here's the final rule on nondiscrimination at USDA--from the preamble:

" Applicants and program participants will provide the race, ethnicity, and gender data on a voluntary basis."

If I read it correctly, it makes the rules currently applicable to the service center agencies (FSA, NRCS, and RD) apply also to other USDA programs which directly serve people.  That's important, because most of USDA's money is indirect--the food stamp, WIC, etc. program administered through state agencies.  It also expands the protected grounds to political beliefs and gender identity.

The Power of Organization and Wealth

I draw one moral from two different stories in today's Washington Post. 

• In one, South Korean men are searching for brides in China and Vietnam.  According to the story the Korean men are too poor to attract a Korean bride, so they exploit the difference in wealth to go to Vietnam for a woman from a poor background who's hoping to jump up in status.
• In the other, the Kurds in Iraq are expanding the territory they control, and according to the story the people being brought under their control are accepting it.  Order and security are better than a ruling elite of one's own ethno-religious affiliation.

My moral: the old "golden rule"--he who has the gold rules, modified to say, he who has what people want (money, order) rules.  That's cynical, but it's also rewarding those who provide what people want (and only hurting the poor Vietnamese peasant man and the ideologue in Iraq who puts ideas above human welfare).

Yields on Lake Woebegon Farms

By definition, the farms around Lake Woebegon normally have above average weather.  And "around" extends to the 48 states, at least.  The question really is, whether "normal" should include below average years.  At one time we used "Olympic averaging" in ASCS--tossing the highest and lowest years and using the remaining ones.  But there's always pressure from the field and from Congress to recognize that we live in Lake Woebegon, and that applies to crop insurance as well as the old disaster programs of the 1970's.

From yesterday's Farm Policy:

A news release yesterday from Chairman Conaway stated that, “[Chairman Conaway] called on the Agriculture Department to implement the Actual Production History adjustment in 2015. The adjustment was part of the 2014 Farm Bill and allows farmers to prevent harvest years that are affected by severe weather from having a negative impact on the calculations determining their crop insurance coverage. ‘There are farmers and ranchers who have experienced severe drought for three years,’ Congressman Conaway said. ‘Many remain in severe drought this year. A good many of these areas are in D-4 drought condition. Despite all of this, we understand the department intends to administratively delay APH relief until 2016, the THIRD year of a FIVE year farm bill. I respectfully urge the department to respond to this natural disaster in states like Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado and other states around the country with the same speed and determination as one would expect in the case of a wildfire or a hurricane.’
“While Under Secretary Scuse did not commit to implement the provision earlier than the fall of 2015, he did commit to go back and investigate and provide the committee with detail about potential timelines, and even consider a partial implementation for areas and crops most impacted by drought and losses in the farm bill.”

Didn't Know This--Roosters Have Breeds

From Reuters, hattip Farm Policy:

"key breed of rooster has a genetic issue that is reducing its fertility"

(Never thought about the breeding of chickens, I assume given the short life span of roosters, we're talking about a son of a son of a son--i.e., a lineage?)

The Enrichment of Rural Life

Was looking at a recent post on Life on a Colorado Farm, the one where she asks for help in identifying a bird at her feeder, then viewed the comments.  The LCF writer lives on a butte in Colorado, so she sees a lot of weather, and nice views.  In this she's a lot like my mother, who lived near the top of a hill in upstate New York, and enjoyed the views looking west over the hills. 

When mom married she moved to the valley, which she regretted. Her life on the hill was  back in the early 1900's so there's a great difference in life experiences.  A few of them:

• LCF has a camera with which she takes many great pictures.  Mom had a similar enjoyment of natural phenomena, the clouds, the snow, the seasons, etc. but had no way to record it.
• LCF has the Internet and a blog.  Mom had a lonely life on the hill--they had a watering trough by the gravel road which passed between house and barn and she was eager to visit with the few passersby who would stop to water their horses.  During my childhood she was equally eager to visit with the people who came to buy our cracked eggs.  But I'm sure she would have much enjoyed the companionship available through a blog and blogroll and sharing with people with similar circumstances and backgrounds.

The Rural Blog does a good job at reporting on rural life, which often has greater problems than nonrural life (i.e. drugs, access to healthcare, economy, etc. etc.). One thing we need to remember is the isolation of rural life in the not too-remote past, and the changes made by modern technology.

Gains in the South

A surprising factoid:

 Since 1980, almost all of the expansion of black white-collar employment shares have been in the South.

Round Oak Rag Apple Elevation--Something Completely Different

We had registered Holsteins on our farm, which if I recall meant we had to send in registration papers which included either a sketch of the cow's markings or a photo.  I assume the data included the cow's ancestry.  And the vet who did the artificial insemination would discuss with dad which bull's semen to use, which one was popular, etc. etc.  I never really got into this aspect of the business, and it was a business--but I was aware of the strange names of the bulls, which leads to the title of this post.

Anyhow today, via Northview Valley blog, I get to the bull in the title.  He even has his own wikipedia page, although it's flagged as having problems.

Humans Are Lazy

A quote from a TEchnology Review post--human drivers weren’t trustworthy enough to be co-pilots to Google’s software:

That approach had to be scrapped after tests showed that human drivers weren’t trustworthy enough to be co-pilots to Google’s software. When people began riding in one of the vehicles, they paid close attention to what the car was doing and to activity on the road around them, which meant the hand-off between person and machine was smooth. But that interest faded to indifference over weeks and months as people became too trusting of the car’s abilities. “Humans are lazy,” says Fairfield. “People go from plausible suspicion to way overconfidence.”

Lack of Compatibility

From NASCOE's June update.:

"We recently learned that OMB /DAFP made a visit a Pennsylvania county office a few weeks ago. The visit focused on the progress of MIDAS. The group was curious why MIDAS is not being used as the platform for the new farm bill programs, and asked why we continue to utilize 2 systems (Web Farm & MIDAS). We understand that the group seemed to be surprised at the lack of compatibility and interaction of our software programs. Reports were that the visit was beneficial, yet eye opening for the OMB/DAFO group." 

 One thing the IT types who were involved in Infoshare never understood, and I failed to make them understand, was the problem of transitioning from legacy systems to new systems.  We went through hell in 1985-7 when we transitioned to the System/36 and everyone was happy to forget the pains.  As Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

The Ridiculous II

This article at Modern Farmer shows the extent to which our wealthy society can extend the ridiculous.

I can understand the logic of this dairy farm: maximizing the welfare of dairy cows.  Late breeding, no slaughter--cows dying when they "naturally" would.  It's not 100 percent clear, but apparently they don't send their bull calves to slaughter either.  It all fits the touchy-feely ethos of the food movement, but more so.

I can accept that 100 years from now wealthy nations will get most of their milk and meat from truly industrial process (i.e., bypassing animals altogether).  The remainder of the supply might be subdivided with various approaches, some organic, some slaughter free, etc.

But I won't be around to see it and I'm too much a man of my time and place to find it other than ridiculous.   A quote:

"At $10 per gallon, the price of slaughter-free milk is almost triple the cost of whole milk, which retails for an average of $3.69 per gallon. The price reflects the cost of producing the milk as well as calf care and “retirement” costs for the herd. (The cost of labor isn’t factored into the price because the farmhands are volunteers).

 So the true price is probably closer to $20 per gallon, because the labor is being paid/supported by trust funds, etc.  Might one be able to find suckers customers willing to pay more than three times the price of conventional milk?  Might one be able to find suckers people willing to get up at 4 am to milk the cows for no pay?  Yes, I suppose one might.  I still say ridiculous.

The Persistence of Myths and Cartoons

I suspect anyone who works in a given field long enough will find numerous errors and myths in the mass media depiction of the field.  This has not, I think, changed with the Internet. Whenever I go to wikipedia on some agriculture related stuff, I find errors.  If I had energy I might correct them but I don't, mostly. (For example, US agriculture says agricultural activity occurs in "most states".) Or many general statements about agricultural subsidies are wrong or misleading.

The Post's Glenn Kessler recently identified an error in the pages of the NYTimes, in columnist Tom Friedman's column.  (It took as fact Dean Rusk's comment in the Cuban missile crisis, that we were eyeball to eyeball and the other guy just blinked--not true.) 

I'm reminded of a famous cartoon, I think it was, showing a guy working late and telling his wife: 'there's something wrong on the Internet".   But the Internet is great--I just googled to find that cartoon so the link was added after I wrote.

Speaking of cartoons, I strongly recommend this book--very funny

Alas, Poor USDA, I Knew You When

From Farm Policy

Chairman Lucas explained that, “It turns out that the three software platforms that were necessary to use the computers to, in a speedy fashion, address these issues would not cross match. And I’ve had conversations with the Secretary of Agriculture himself about this. He’s assured me that the best minds at IBM have been working diligently on it. But what it amounts to is because everything won’t speak to everything else in their computer system, they’ve had to mechanically do it, to manually fill out the forms.
“And I know that slowed the process down, and I know a lot of our neighbors out there have appointments that run over into July to have time with an FSA employee to fill out the paperwork to do it. But I would urge people: be patient, make sure you’ve got an appointment, be prompt, take the information that’s requested of you to bring. It is worth your time to do. We are pushing, encouraging USDA in Washington, D.C. to do whatever it takes to make the systems work together.

Yes, more than 20 years ago this was an issue.  Obviously Congressional "pushing" has had no effect.

The Ridiculous and the Great: What's the Difference

This is ridiculous: a post on a person who's developed the second largest drone company in the world. What the bio for Jordi Munoz at the company's site doesn't say is he started at 20 and is now 28, 

Jordi Muñoz is co-founder and CTO of 3D Robotics. He was born in Ensenada, Mexico, and raised in Tijuana. He studied briefly at Ensenada’s Center for Technical and Higher Education before moving to southern California in 2007, where in his free time he designed and built his first drone. The autopilot ran on circuitry he lifted from a Wii remote.

Soon Jordi was making a living off his ingenuity. He hacked a toaster that he bought at Target, turned it into a reflow oven, and set up a small manufacturing facility in his apartment, designing UAV parts and selling them to pilots around the world.

Jordi’s work impressed Chris Anderson—the two met virtually through the DIY Drones online community—who supported Jordi with an initial $500 check. Chris continued to advise Jordi’s production efforts over email, and in 2009 the two co-founded 3D Robotics. In 2012, Chris quit Wired to join Jordi full time.

Jordi lives with his family in San Diego

Research Using Acreage Report Data

Here's a report from a Stanford team which used acreage report data.

Lobell's team examined an unprecedented amount of detailed field data from more than 1 million USDA crop insurance records between 1995 and 2012.
"The idea was pretty simple," he said. "We determined which conditions really matter for corn and soy yields, and then tracked how farmers were doing at different levels of these conditions over time. But to do that well, you really need a lot of data, and this dataset was a beauty."

The takeaway appears to be this: "But in the past two decades we saw very small yield gains in non-irrigated corn under the hottest conditions. This suggests farmers may be pushing the limits of what's possible under these conditions."

Wonder what other conclusions could be supported by "Big Data" in the form of FSA or RMA datasets?

Line of the Day

"Also, “Man Bites Man” is always going to be an interesting story.  “Man Kills Man” is, sadly, not a novel event."

Joel Achenbach, on World Cup soccer and other diversions from serious concerns,

USDA Website and New Farmers

USDA just unveiled a new website intended to help new farmers.  I've mixed feelings about the USDA home website and the new one, but yet I don't know how you do it, "it" being to develop a website which serves all possible new farmers.  Looking at the USDA site I have a scattering of reactions.

I see USDA has yet to come up with one way to locate all offices which would serve new farmers--they still have one url for NRCS/RD/FSA service centers and a separate one for cooperative extension service.

I don't see any mention of state and local government offices which might be of concern, or government offices outside USDA (i.e., EPA, BLM).

So far, all the links to the website from the USDA home page seem to be time-driven (I'm searching for a word here--they appear in lists of radio news releases, or the slide show of current news, there's no "new farmers'' link.

If I use the search box to search for "new farmer", I get the blog posts, as well as an NAL page, but not the home page for the new farmer website.  The NAL page is also on the first page of Google results for "new farmer".  I wonder if the people heading the new farmer effort ever worked with NAL, or were aware of their effort. 

Locavore and Organic

Technology Review has a piece on LED lights in greenhouses.  Includes this surprising factoid:

Consequently, the number of commercial greenhouses and the area they occupy is rocketing. In the Netherlands, for example, greenhouses occupy around 0.25 per cent of the land area of the entire country.

 It reports on a study showing LED lights would be much cheaper than sodium lights, with the interesting possibility of tailoring the color spectrum output to match plant characteristics--certain plants use some parts of the spectrum and not others, etc.

I wonder whether greenhouse plants can be organic, if grown under unnatural lights.

NY Times February 14, 1883 Want Ads

I happened to do a search which led me to the NYTimes issue of 2/14/1883--it's only available to subscribers, apparently.  It had been a while since I'd been in their archive, which they've improved.  They now display the whole issue, which was 8 or 10 pages then.  Very business oriented stuff, lots of reports of commercial activity--shipping and prices and such.

There were some want ads, though instead of being ads of job openings, they were ads for jobs wanted, mostly by servants, maids, cooks, coachmen etc.  Not sure why the difference, or when the want ads shifted to mostly job openings.  Might make a nice paper for some aspiring historian/economist.

Record Retention Policies

I've not followed the IRS scandal in detail, mostly because as a liberal I doubt if there's anything much there.  The latest is IRS is unable to provide Ms. Lerner's emails from a period in 2011.  The right is screaming 18 1/2 minutes, the left is blase.

Megan McArdle says the IRS story is possible.

I've no idea what actually happened.  When I came to ASCS, the records management people were still remembering the Billie Sol Estes scandal (a Texas wheeler-dealer, one of whose scams was transferring cotton acreage allotments from one county to another in order to make more money).  Congress tried to investigate, and found the ASCS correspondence and records were in a mess, resulting in establishing a new system of central files and documentation.  They were proud of the system; I remember in the 70's they showed it off to a visiting Soviet representative(s).  The system worked with the hierarchical nature of the organization: correspondence came up the line or from the public, replies went down the line or to the public, decisions were made using CCC board dockets mostly, or reflected in memos or directives to the field.

By the 90's, everyone who'd been involved in creating the system was gone and there was no one left who really understood the importance of records management. And since the early 80's we'd been using one email system or another (Wang, Dec Allinone, etc.) finally ending with a central email system.  Telecommunications costs had come down and we used more conference calls etc.    But the multiplication of communication channels and the gradual decline in the hierarchical nature of the organization meant there was less of a clear division between decisions which were considered official records and those which were not.  And when you looked at email that was especially true.  The initial starting point was that not all emails were official records, those that were had to be printed out and stored on paper in established files.

Bottomline, by the time I left, I had no confidence in the record management of FSA--management had never given it the time and money it required.  Another scandal might lead to a change in the situation, but it was very unlikely to be solved otherwise.

I don't know whether the same situation held in other government agencies then, or in IRS today, but I wouldn't be surprised.  Here's a link to a search on the GAO site for records management.

Farming in DC

Everyone needs their own agricultural research station, even DC, as outlined in this article.

Here's the URL for UDC's college of agriculture.  It looks to me as if they're pushing the envelope a bit to make use of extension funding? 

I mock, a little, but this is the result of our weak government because of federalism. 

You Gotta Laugh, Even If You're a Bureaucrat

From today's Post:

"In November, we reported that the NSA and Homeland Security Department were none too pleased about parody products sold online using an altered image of their logo, such as a T-shirt with: “Peeping while you’re sleeping” inside the NSA seal and under that, “The NSA, the only part of the government that actually listens.”

When will people learn that laughter is valuable, even if you're the butt of it.

A Divided Country and a Flawed Commentary

The NYTimes Charles Blow weighs in on the recent Pew report describing how divided and partisan the nation is becoming.

He leads with this:

"For an increasing number of Americans, the tenor of politics has reached a near-religious pitch, in which people on opposing ends of the ideological scale take on theological properties: good or evil, angels or demons, here to either save our way of life or destroy it."

After a discussion of the report he writes:

"There are some moral issues on which there can be no ambiguity. For instance, people cannot be treated differently because of the way they were born, developed or identify;  women must have access to the full range of reproductive options; and something must be done about the continued carnage of gun violence in this country. "

I commented with this:

Though I think Mr. Blow and I share the same positions, mostly (liberal Democrat, Obama contributor, etc.) I disagree with this paragraph: "There are some moral issues on which there can be no ambiguity...country. " We cannot, in our political life, distinguish between moral issues and other issues. In politics everything is subject to practicality, to compromise, to limits. Outside the political sphere everyone is welcome to believe any damn thing they believe, but our politicians should lead us to compromise in our policy. Roe v Wade was an example of such a compromise, not a trumpet call to a pro-choice position. The alternative to compromise can be seen in someplace like Ulster over the last century.

Kevin Drum has a take on the report.

Great Metaphor If Politically Incorrect

" it’s like an epileptic with Parkinson’s dancing under strobe lights in a discothèque."

Dirk Beauregard on the joys of driving a crap car.  Read the whole thing.

On Blogging--Personal and Policy

Was reading a fine post by Sharon Astyk here which starts off by commenting on the observable differences in parenting ability she finds among the domestic animals and wildlife on their small farm.  I've seen the same, though I was nowhere near as observant as she is.

She then segues into a discussion of human parenting, of which she's seen much, as she and her husband are parents and foster parents of a large number of children.

When I first started reading her, she was blogging as a peak oil/locavore activist.  She always had an interesting voice, interesting enough to overcome my knee-jerk reaction against the positions she favored and the dire future she forecast.  But time happens to us all, and these days she's less into policy and much less into blogging and much more into managing a large and variable household.  Whether her blogging, as opposed to the subjects she blogs on,  has changed that much, I don't know, but I do find myself liking her writing a lot more.

Residents and Tourists

Living in the DC area I intuitively knew what these anthropologists spent time and money figuring out--the travel patterns of residents and tourists are different. The fact leads to things like tourists seeing sights and visiting vicinities which the resident has never seen.

When I was in the Army stationed at Ft. Belvoir I did a lot of tourist stuff.  Since I've lived here, hardly any, except when escorting visitors.

As far as the "settling in" of new residents, my guess is it's personality-dependent: the amount of exploring before establishing habits/patterns will vary.

Politics in FSA

 From a Government Executive piece on VA problems

“Health care is by definition an enormously specific, patient-oriented, detailed business process,” he said. “The agency itself was designed to be sealed against political influence,” he added, noting its 9,000 to 1 ratio of career to political appointees, compared with a 2,000 to 1 ratio at the Defense Department and a 500 to 1 ratio at most agencies.

In FSA when I was there: 50 SED's, 5 area directors, 4 deputies, associate, and administrator, plus maybe 5 aides--call it 65 total political. That's a 200 to 1 ratio at FSA, meaning it's more politicized than the average agency. 

Our Couch Potato Dogs

Modern Farmer reports on research that says "agility dogs" (i.e. farm dogs) do better on tests than do "companion dogs" (i.e., those dogs who spend their lives on the couch alongside their masters).  Must be why Walt Jeffries boasts of his talking dogs.

Buffett on Government, No It's Private

Brad Delong posts Warren Buffett's lessons learned:

My most surprising discovery: the overwhelming importance in government business of an unseen force that we might call “the institutional imperative.” In business school, I was given no hint of the imperative’s existence and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the government business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent, and experienced civil servants managers would automatically make rational government business decisions. But I learned over time that isn’t so. Instead, rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play.

For example: (1) As if governed by Newton’s First Law of Motion, an government agency institution will resist any change in its current direction; (2) Just as work expands to fill available time, government corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up available funds; (3) Any government business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rate-of-return and strategic studies prepared by his troops; and (4) The behavior of government consultants peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation or whatever, will be mindlessly imitated.

Ode to Mud, Sweat, and Baths

Walt Jeffries at Sugar Mountain Farm.

" The extra protein allowed for our brains to grow swelling our heads until we thought we were masters of the Universe"

Those Were the Days--Were They?

An old man gets nostalgic reading this Life on a Colorado Farm post about haying, then and now.  But the voice of reality insists:

• I wasn't putting up beautiful alfalfa hay, but less pretty timothy/meadow grass/weeds hay, sometimes having gone through a rain or two which severely diminished its value
• it wasn't early June but likely early July, since we had to wait for the neighbor who did the baling to get his hay done first--a penalty for being a small farmer
• I didn't work on a crew of four, except for a few occasions when I hired out, but usually just with dad, perhaps my sister, and sometimes one neighbor helper
• it wasn't a beautiful blue sky on top of a Colorado mesa but a likely cloudy sky in a New York valley
• and the cut ends of the hay scratched the hell out of my forearms.

Nice how modern machinery enables an older couple (still younger than me) to continue farming but being realistic I suspect there's few to no young neighbor boys around to help--machinery means the population is thinning out in rural areas and getting old.

Would Reagan Have Made the Bergdahl Trade?

I follow the Powerline blog.  Disagree with 90+ percent of what is said, but it offers a view into the right wing.  Currently all the bloggers there are up in arms attacking the Bergdahl deal. 

I see this post reporting on a discussion tomorrow at the Reagan library.  No mention of the subject matter, but I have a suggestion:  Pro or con--would Saint Ronald have made the same decision Obama did?

One of Many Things I Don't Know

I blogged the other day about the VA.  This Kevin Drum post, reporting that the retirement migration of vets skews the supply-demand picture, overcrowding the SW facilities, shows that while my logic was okay my argument falls based on the facts.  Damn stubborn things, facts are.

Get Those Kids Off the Farm

That's the lesson of China in recent years, of the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and now of Africa.

Via Chris Blattman, this is the summary of a research paper entitled: "What is driving the 'African Growth Miracle'?

We show that much of Africa’s recent growth and poverty reduction can be traced to a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This decline has been accompanied by a systematic increase in the productivity of the labor force, as it has moved from low productivity agriculture to higher productivity manufacturing and services. These declines have been more rapid in countries where the initial share of the labor force engaged in agriculture is the highest and where commodity price increases have been accompanied by improvements in the quality of governance.

In the US the improvements in machinery after the Civil War, added to the rapid immigration from Europe (including two of my grandparents), enabled us to grow.