It's not just wealthy individuals who get farm subsidies - state governments are reaping the benefits too. In Arkansas, for example, EWG ranks the state's Department of Correction as the top subsidy beneficiary, pulling in nearly $2.3 million from 2003-2005. The University of Illinois is first in Illinois, with nearly $1.3 million in payments for the three-year period. [More] [Emphasis added]I just don't get any sense of outrage, but maybe the combined efforts of disparate voices such as Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) will have some effect:
Current farm policy favors corporate special interests. Fully 70 percent of the payments go to the top 10 percent of farmers, and even more of that benefit is concentrated for the large processors. What’s more, aid is so concentrated in a few powerful states that the support received by most states is almost negligible. We deserve a food and farm policy that serves all Americans, not just the politically-connected. [More]It would be easy to giggle about a liberal from Oregon wandering into the farm policy debate like a choirboy into a pool hall, but efforts like these have sprung up all over. While they may be too diffuse politically to accomplish much, we DCP-collectors need to remember we can't fool all of the people all of the time.
Rudy Giuliani: Six visits to the state show that Giuliani at least knows where Iowa is. But as a national figure who polls remarkably well, "America's Mayor" has made no secret of his emphasis on Florida and other "Super-Duper Tuesday" states over the traditional first three; strategists in rival campaigns simply note that garnering the nomination this way would upset the calendar once and for all. To the extent he does decide to take on the state, Giuliani's chances in Iowa are hampered by a slight tin ear for the rhythms of the heartland: it's not just his support of abortion rights and his colorful personal life, but missteps like his advance staff reneging on an event with an Iowa farmer who turned out not to be rich enough to help illustrate Giuliani's stance in support of abolishing the estate tax. [More]While some have argued moving up so many big-state primaries to early February will make Iowa more critical, I'm not so sure. This could be the last moment in the political sun for the tiny electoral prize.
In a review to be published in the May 18 issue of the journal Science, Jonathan Haidt, associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, discusses a new consensus scientists are reaching on the origins and mechanisms of morality. Haidt shows how evolutionary, neurological and social-psychological insights are being synthesized in support of three principles:The line about the lawyers was painful, but I suspect Haidt may be right. More intriguing is the possibility that science may make this problem even more divisive in our culture.
1) Intuitive primacy, which says that human emotions and gut feelings generally drive our moral judgments;
2) Moral thinking if for social doing, which says that we engage in moral reasoning not to figure out the truth, but to persuade other people of our virtue or to influence them to support us; and
3) Morality binds and builds, which says that morality and gossip were crucial for the evolution of human ultrasociality, which allows humans - but no other primates - to live in large and highly cooperative groups.
"Putting these three principles together forces us to re-evaluate many of our most cherished notions about ourselves," says Haidt, whose own research demonstrates that people generally follow their gut feelings and make up moral reasons afterwards. "Since the time of the Enlightenment," Haidt says, "many philosophers have celebrated the power and virtue of cool, dispassionate reasoning. Unfortunately, few people other than philosophers can engage in such cool, honest reasoning when moral issues are at stake. The rest of us behave more like lawyers, using any arguments we can find to make our case, rather than like judges or scientists searching for the truth. This doesn't mean we are doomed to be immoral; it just means that we should look for the roots of our considerable virtue elsewhere - in the emotions and intuitions that make us so generally decent and cooperative, yet also sometimes willing to hurt or kill in defense of a principle, a person or a place." [More]
When offspring genetic engineering becomes possible I expect parental choices to produce bigger differences in how people morally reason. Conservative-leaning people will make their children morally reason even more strongly in the conservative style. The liberals will do likewise. So the size of the center will shrink. This will lead to deeper political divisions and perhaps civil war in some countries and wars between countries.The most alarming prospect of genetic engineering of humans for me is, while we are busy deciding which traits and predispositions we want in our children, other cultures are out-reproducing us. We're overplanning - they are taking potluck, and getting on with business.
I also expect offspring genetic engineering to produce more other styles of moral reasoning including ones that are rare today and others that do not exist at all today. Who knows, maybe genetic engineering will move libertarianism up in the ranks of moral reasoning styles. [More]
After more than a decade in the wilderness, health care has returned to the center of the political discussion. But the only topic getting any serious attention is universal health insurance. It’s the entire point of the ambitious new program in Massachusetts and a similar proposal in California. Universal coverage has dominated both the news media’s coverage of the Democratic presidential candidates’ reform ideas and the candidates’ own jockeying over those ideas. [More of an insightful article]The underlying problem is painfully (no pun intended) obvious. We cannot afford, individually or collectively all the health care we think we need. Worse still, we don't need much of what we want.
Ultimately, I think we are headed for a collision of cultural values. We prefer insulation to real insurance. We expect services to be readily available, without the supply limitations or waiting lists that exist in countries where government is responsible for more health care funding. And yet we are growing increasingly concerned over the expansion of health care spending that takes place in a system that lacks constraints on either supply or demand.
Real health insurance may not be popular now. But when Americans see that the providers of insulation, including Medicare, have to turn to the rationing of health care services in order to meet budgetary constraints, real health insurance may start to look like a good alternative. [More]
Perhaps not surprisingly, the press release associated with this work focused on those compounds, including herbicides, that are most resistant to biodegradation, but fails to mention the even larger group of compounds that are intrinsically biodegradable. The usual news write ups about toxic chemicals and the environment 9999 times out of 10000 will inevitably highlight those that are the nastiest.
The huge benefits of the thousands of organic compounds used in the pharma, biotech, plastics, and other industries as well as medicine and agriculture will simply be ignored whether or not those compounds accumulate in the environment or not. Biodegradation is only one route by which thousands of compounds are destroyed naturally in the environment (heat, light and interaction with other non-living materials, are others). The predictive system will be useful, certainly, but its wider applicability should consider these other routes and the risk factors and toxicity associated with any particular chemical, rather than tarnishing all entries in the database simply on the basis of whether or not a microbial enzyme exists to digest it. [More]
The draft also reauthorizes the peanut program, including an extension of the 2002 Farm Bill's direct and counter-cyclical payment and loan provisions for peanut farmers. The loan rate would be increased from $355 per ton to $375 per ton and payments acres would be lowered from 85% of base acres to 74%.
The Subcommittee voted to extend the current sugar program until 2012, requiring the USDA Secretary to continue to operate the program at no cost to the federal government by avoiding forfeitures of sugar. [More]
The Universal Service Tax (Fund) has benefited rural citizens by helping to establish rural telephone companies. Because telephones provide a vital link to emergency services, to government services and to surrounding communities, it has been our nation’s policy to promote telephone service to all households since this service began in the 1930s. The USF helps to make phone service affordable and available to all Americans, including consumers with low incomes, those living in areas where the costs of providing telephone service is high, schools and libraries and rural health care providers. Congress has mandated that all telephone companies providing interstate service must contribute to the USF. Although not required to do so by the government, many carriers choose to pass their contribution costs on to their customers in the form of a line item, often called the “Federal Universal Service Fee” or “Universal Connectivity Fee”. [More]But the fund has swollen to over $7B annually and is badly mismanaged. Sadly, this is a rural-on-rural problem.
Most people familiar with the universal service fund, including members of the FCC, agree that it has grown out of tune with the times. But reforming it has proven difficult because small wireline telephone companies have grown accustomed to collecting subsidies and lobbying their political representatives to keep the money flowing, said U.S. Cellular's Rooney. [More]Those small wireline companies are typically rural phone coops whose business plans have always been financially distorted because a significant portion of their budget came from the USF - a permanent subsidy.
The basic problem is that the High-Cost Fund subsidizes small rural local exchange carriers (RLECs) on the basis of their reported costs of providing service. This cost-plus system provides no incentive to reduce costs or to provide service using the most efficient technology. On the contrary, it rewards inefficiency. As a result, according to a recent study by George Mason University economist Thomas Hazlett, subsidies can be as much as $13,000 per year per line. Hazlett estimates that yearly savings of $1 billion are easily achievable using standard mobile and satellite phone subscriptions to provide service to people in sparsely populated areas. [More]Meanwhile, because IL cell phone companies have not been applying for USF funds to build towers downstate, the proposed cap means they won't be getting any in the future if they did try.
Recently, the USF has gained new attention as several Iowa-based companies have used USF subsidies to provide free, international calling.[1] This practice, which began in late 2006, represents an unintended consequence of the USF. [More]The secret seems to be to live in a state with 1 Senator for about every 1000 citizens, not Illinois.
Another recommendation is the use of "reverse auctions" to assign universal service obligations, a plan endorsed by FCC Chairman Kevin Martin. Phone carriers would compete to become the "provider of last resort" in areas where regulators deem local services insufficient, bidding a price, to be paid by the government, to supply such services. The lowest-cost bidder wins. [More]The political clout of rural telcos - the beneficiaries of these billions - will likely prevent this, unless the addition of wireless carriers changes the dynamics of the debate. Their argument of degraded communication consequences reminds me of predictions referring to commodity subsidy reform. Still cost-plus calculation to determine government support has seldom proven to be economically efficient. The process of learning competitive business practices would be difficult, but not impossible.
At a Brazilian ethanol conference June 4-5, Brazilian government-funded researchers said they have perfected a method of producing cellulosic ethanol that drastically reduces the cost of processing. At this point, the assertion -- and many other similarly optimistic claims made at the conference -- is unconfirmed. But should it prove true, the world could well be peeking over the horizon at a massive geopolitical, not to mention economic, shift. [More]
More tricky is the problem of the ethanol production itself. Cellulosic biomass is bulky and materially complex, unfit for the same methods of ethanol extraction used with corn. In order to even get the stuff into manageable form, processors must soak it in a pre-treatment bath, followed by an acidic or enzymatic digestion that splits it into simple sugars. [More]Perhaps cellulosic ethanol will become a major part of energy plans. But think about the ramifications if we can sell crop residue.
Because the economic impact of a political primary is so short-lived, few deep analyses have been done on the subject. Officials in Iowa, which hosts the nation’s first contest in the presidential campaign calendar, the Iowa Caucus, suggest the quadrennial event brought between $70 million and $90 million into the state in 2000, but have never quantified how they arrived at that number. [More]
Livestock producers pay lower feed costs, but their inclination to raise output in response leads to falling output prices as quantities move along an inelastic demand. [Full report]Run that around in your mind for a while.
Your reporter remains skeptical about USDA’s refusal to allow voluntary BSE testing. As has been argued before, it’s not that voluntary testing is needed or the expense justified.This semi-science matter may be linked in the USDA's policy thinking to analogous issues with BST-labels for milk. Allowing marketing differentiation based on the consumer's health perceptions and not the regulator's is profoundly new territory. It may be the USDA is appealing just to say "Hey, we did all we could - blame the courts", when beef industry honchos complain.
That’s not the question.
It’s a matter of the proper role of government and the fact that, from a public relations angle, this looks awful. [More]
“So this is a huge deal. If Pelosi blocks amendments on the bill, it is very possible that reforms suppported by the majority of the House will not be in the House version of the farm bill because votes will never be allowed. This would be a subversion of democracy- one committee being allowed to write an enormously important piece of legislation without regard to the desires of the rest of the House. In effect, this means that the citizens represented by Ag Committee members will get to write the farm bill- and to hell with everyone else.As I have said before, Pres. Bush (remember him?) is still a wild card, and could actually be a powerful reformer ally - regardless of whose side of the aisle they are on. The question is would reformers vote to sustain a veto?
“Let me go further. If Pelosi blocks amendments on the 2007 farm bill that are supported by a majority of the House, that would be a clear message that the change in leadership in the House means nothing at all; that the Democratic leadership intends to run the House in the same top-down corporate fashion as its predecessors.” [More good political analysis]
AUGUST 5TH.-- Another most terrific thunder-storm broke, last night, peal after peal, over head in deafening, crushing sauna; and the lightning's glare seemed burning the heavens from pole to pole! the torrents of rain came right through the warped "shakes" on the roof; the wind was blowing--the mud, from the logs, and water, were flying in every direction through our cabin. I made every effort to keep my sick ones dry, but my husband, children, and myself, being in the loft, got completely drenched and my husband and children had their chills in the midst of the storm. We kept our beds until a late hour this morning, as wet as they were, they being the most comfortable place, while the sun was drying up the water around.I am struck by how mobile early Americans were despite the problems of travel. If you saw the PBS documentary "The Mormons" perhaps you noticed a similar theme of building a new society somewhere in the vast frontier, as Mrs. Colt also believed.
Mr. Broadbent came this forenoon, went to the spring over the river again for water, making a walk of four miles from his tent to get two pails of water for us.
I bring water from the creek, where it stands just in the deep places, and they have to be dug out for that. This water will do to cook with and for washing.
The Indians pass every day in long files, on ponies and on foot, going to Cofuchigue "to swap," as they say, their dried buffalo meat, tallow and robes, for coffee, sugar, tobacco and whisky. Their ponies of burden are so heavily loaded that the juveniles who ride them have their limbs horizontally extended, instead of hanging down. Their many long-eared, grizzly-gray, gaunt-looking dogs, bring up the rear. How they can keep alive such a drove of dogs after their hunt is over, and keep them in going order, is truly a problem not for me to solve. They look like so many hungry hyenas; I should think they would swallow both horse and rider, and "lick their chops for more." Their buffalo meat is relished by some. It seems to be clean, and sweet; it is cured without salt, by being cut into strips, braided, the braids woven into a web, with strings of bark, and dried in smoke; can be bought by the yard, half or fourth, just as one desires or their appetite craves.
Some of the squaws have been here to-day; wanted to "swap" some of their dried buffalo meat for some pumpkins we had in our cabin. I gave them the pumpkins, and they handed back some dried meat. Father and the children relish it. Willie says, "please mamma, give Willie some dried buffalo meat." We have so little change in our diet, that almost anything is relished. We have plenty of green corn and squashes, but I am afraid to let the sick satisfy their appetites, which have become craving, as they always do, after having the chills for a while. I can persuade my little children to lay the cob by for a little, with the corn half eaten off, but it is a difficult matter to persuade children whose heads are gray with age, for "they know, they guess, when they have eaten enough, and when they are hungry." [More]
Manly phones for manly men.Do you long for the days when a phone handset was comfortable, hefty and tough enough to be slammed onto the receiver when being solicited by telemarketers? Our retro handset brings back those good ol' days and looks cool too! In a world of small-and-getting-smaller-cellphones, this retro handset converts your tiny phone into a beefy, comfortable retro phone! 2.5mm jack works with most phones (Motorola, LG, Samsung); not compatible with RAZR or Nokia phones. Cell phone not included.
While questions continue to arise about the alleged plot to blow up a fuel pipeline beneath JFK Airport and surrounding neighborhoods, some are questioning why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg hasn't had a louder voice since the plot was foiled on Saturday.My thoughts exactly. The best answer to the terrorist threat is not to build a fortress America complete with police state and rampant paranoia. It is to keep on keepin' on.
On Monday, Bloomberg finally weighed in, but his response was not what some would have expected.
"There are lots of threats to you in the world. There's the threat of a heart attack for genetic reasons. You can't sit there and worry about everything. Get a life," he said. [More]
What distinguishes the politician from the political agitator is a lively concern for his own job security. Politicians sometimes say what they believe, but they don't usually say things that might jeopardize their political future. Until recently, Chuck Hagel was a consummate politician, and a successful one at that. He defeated a popular sitting governor in his first Senate race in 1996 and won reelection, in 2002, with 83 percent of the vote. While he occasionally strayed from the GOP fold on foreign policy--an ardent internationalist, he had criticized both the Iraq war and neoconservatism generally--his credentials as a loyal Republican were never in doubt. He has long been a predictable vote on issues of importance to the American Conservative Union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the Christian right. And he remains so. It's not well-known, but Kyoto foe Hagel is still skeptical that humans are triggering global warming. "We always had climate change," he told me during a recent interview. "The issue is what is causing this. We still do not know." [More of an superb article, free subscription required and recommended]While we parse the minute details of nuance and expression of the early debates, I find hope for the Republic in people like these who are increasingly compelled by their beliefs, rather than polls.
The Apple II remains one of the most successful personal computers ever built and, in fact, remained in production until October 1993, when the Macintosh finally put it out to pasture. In all its iterations, around 6 million of these puppies rolled off the assembly line. [More]
It has taken me years to make tentative peace with my stops and starts during work. Every morning I vow to become a morning person, starting full speed out of the gate. And every morning I daydream, shuffle papers, read e-mail messages and visit blogs, and somehow it is time for lunch. Then, at about 2 p.m., a sense of urgency kicks in, and I write steadily, until about 5 or 6, when I revert to the little-of-this, some-of-that style of the morning.I like that - we just don't know how to measure how hard I am working. But why do we even care?
Over the years I have come to see that the hours away from the writing are the time when the real work gets done. When a paragraph turns itself this way and that in a corner of my brain even while my fingers are buying books on Amazon.com. What appears to be wasted time is really jell time. This redefinition only makes me feel a little less guilty.
Mr. Kustka assures me that the problem is not the three to four hours of concentrated work I do each day, but rather the outmoded paradigm against which I measure that work. Productivity was directly related to time back when Mr. Gilbreth was measuring things, he said, but the connection is less direct today.
“We are in a knowledge-worker world,” he says. “If you were building me a building, I could measure the number of bricks. If you were loading a truck, I could measure the number of boxes. But I can’t simply count your words. That doesn’t measure quality.” [More of an oddly comforting article]
A few companies are taking the concept of “watch what I produce, not how I produce it” even further. At the headquarters of Best Buy in Minneapolis, for instance, the hot policy of the moment is called ROWE, short for Results Only Work Environment.As our work in agriculture looks less and less like what our fathers did, and more and more like desk work, our job satisfaction will depend on being able to see value in how we spend our time. We were strongly indoctrinated to the idea of hard work - we just have lost the ability to discern what hard work is, perhaps.
There workers can come in at four or leave at noon, or head for the movies in the middle of the day, or not even show up at all. It’s the work that matters, not the method. And, not incidentally, both output and job satisfaction have jumped wherever ROWE is tried.
Once Federal mandates for use of biofuels are reached, ethanol's primary use will be as a substitute for gasoline. As such, the ethanol price will have to be competitive with the gasoline price so that consumers will buy ethanol-blended fuels. Because corn is the major production cost for ethanol, the price an ethanol producer will be willing to pay for corn, hereafter referred to as the break-even corn price, will be directly related to the ethanol price. As the ethanol price increases, the break-even corn price increases. Moreover, ethanol price will be directly related to crude oil price. Therefore, break-even corn prices will be positively related to crude oil prices. As crude oil price increases, the price of gasoline will increase leading to higher ethanol and break-even corn prices. Conversely, decreases in crude oil price will lead to a lower gasoline price, a lower ethanol price, and a lower break-even corn price. [More]There follow neat rows and columns of figures, but the punchline for me was the assumption I have highlighted above: "Once Federal mandates for the use of biofuels are reached". This year will get us to around 6B gpy (gallons per year) on our way to a mandate of 7.5 gpy.
Refiners would be forced to triple their use of fuel ethanol over the next decade, under legislation expected to start moving through the Senate this spring.
The legislation, outlined Tuesday by leaders of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, would require use of 18 billion gallons of biofuels by 2016 and 36 billion gallons by 2022.
All but 15 billion gallons of that biofuel each year would have to come from sources other than corn, such as crop residue, switchgrass and forestry waste. [More]
When President Vladimir Putin delivered a stinging critique of US foreign policy at a security conference in Munich in February, stunned politicians in the audience described it as the most anti-Western speech made by a Russian leader since the Cold War.Putin flat creeps me out. His KGB demeanor and the growing signs of authoritarianism trigger too many old memories for many of us Boomers. Perhaps most irritating is how successful this hardliner has been for the Russian people.
But Mr Putin was only just getting started.
In the past five months his fury over American plans to erect a missile defence shield in eastern Europe has become increasingly evident. [More]
Other dangers remain: corruption, the inefficiency of the state apparatus, high levels of social inequity. But generally Russia is in better shape today than seven years ago, when Putin assumed power. Russia now needs more than anything to strengthen law and order and to restore the institutional capacity of the state. Democracy is also needed, but only later, when the rule of law has been established. There is, of course, a danger that the leadership will use political centralization to line everyone up along the ‘vertical of power’ and eliminate opposition in order to live in serene comfort at the citizens’ expense—and perhaps also to embark on the occasional escapade. This has happened in Russia before. But one must choose the lesser of two evils. Strengthening law and order is only possible under a centralized system. Without centralization, there is no chance at all of it happening; unbounded chaos and lawlessness would rule. This seems to be the choice facing Russia today. [More]There was a time children when Russia was our most ardently wooed customer. Friends of mine traveled to the USSR and were seduced by the prospect of long-term trading bonanzas with the Russians. For myself, I couldn't see how their vodka-soaked economy could ever generate any trade wherewithal.
But there's one place -- Russia -- where reserve estimates just seem to go up and up. In its annual statistical survey of world energy, BP PLC (BP ) has recently revised its estimates of Russia's total proven oil reserves to 69.1 billion barrels, 6% of the world's total, up from 45 billion bbl. in 2001. But according to auditors with a worm's-eye view of what's actually going on in the depths of Siberia, such estimates may just scratch the surface of Russia's real potential. According to a recent study by Dallas-based energy reserve auditors DeGolyer & MacNaughton, whose clients include leading Russian energy companies such as Gazprom and Yukos, Russia's true recoverable reserves are between 150 billion bbl. and 200 billion bbl. That's up from industry estimates of 100 billion bbl. a few years ago.But compared to the extraordinary human effort displayed by the Chinese, Russia is basing its future on extraction - mining, drilling, logging, etc. Simply put they are selling their country watt by watt.
Why such a big gap in the estimates? Because it's one thing to be sitting on oil reserves, another to be able to exploit them commercially. In Russia's main oil-producing region in western Siberia, proven reserves represent just 18% to 24% of all oil in the ground, in contrast to about 45% in Western oil-producing regions such as Alaska and the North Sea. But as Russian oil companies adopt technologies, such as horizontal wells and computerized reservoir management systems, the estimated recovery rates are being revised. Thanks to new techniques, which make it possible to obtain oil even from apparently depleted fields, Russian oil companies already have managed to boost their output by 50% since 1998. "The biggest thing is the [new] technology being deployed in western Siberia. The results are beginning to show," says Martin Wiewiorowski, senior vice-president of DeGolyer & MacNaughton in Moscow. [More]
One problem with the farm bill has been its historical lack of balance. For example, only 39 percent of all U.S. farmers and ranchers received crop subsidies in 2005. These farm-bill subsidies support the growing of commodities such as corn and soybeans, but have little support for fruits and vegetables.
These imbalances have consequences for eaters. Between 1985 and 2000, the real price of fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent, while the price of soft drinks and other sugary and high-fat foods declined by as much as 20 percent. If our farm bills had been healthy-food bills, we could have distributed government support more equitably to make nutritious food more affordable. In part because of this imbalance, we are paying more than $100 billion a year in obesity-related medical costs. [More] [My emphasis]
There's growing demand to change how the subsidies are allocated. Some say it's unfair that commodity growers receive nearly all the money. And there's a push to spend more money helping farmers solve environmental problems and less on direct payments to individuals. [More]Moreover, the breadth of the coverage and interest in the new farm bill seems greater. Opinions are popping up in places that never cared much before.
Each year the federal government makes payments worth millions to farmers across the country -- many of whom are massive corporations, not the average family farmer, like Maine farmers. These subsidies promote inefficiency and encourage growers to "game" the system in order to qualify for larger subsidies. [More]This means there could be fewer easily-traded-for votes from urban legislators than in the past. When you don't have many farmers in your district/state, why not swap a farm bill "aye" for a vote that will impact your constituents? That type of thinking may not be as easy to come by anymore. Pressure groups have arguably lowered the "disinterest" in farm payments, I think.
I'm alla time hearing how I don't post enough bowling videos.
This is enough.
[via Information Nation]
What's more, the good and peaceful leaders of Sudan were prepared to retaliate massively: They would cut off shipments of the emulsifier gum arabic, thereby depriving the world of cola.To refresh your chemical memories, gum arabic is umm, well, ... OK, I didn't know either.
"I want you to know that the gum arabic which runs all the soft drinks all over the world, including the United States, mainly 80 percent is imported from my country," the ambassador said after raising a bottle of Coca-Cola. [More]
Gum arabic reduces the surface tension of liquids, which leads to increased fizzing in carbonated beverages. This can be exploited in what is known as a Mentos eruption and can be seen in The Diet Coke & Mentos Challenge. [More]It turns out to be a bluff, however. At least for Coke drinkers.
Sudan does continue to supply the world with about 80 percent of its gum arabic. A decade ago, nearly 80 percent of all the gum arabic imported into the United States came from Sudan, but a lot has changed since then.This would be great material to crack wise about except for the complicating factor of hundreds of thousands of dead people at the hands of bozos like Khartoum Karl. Recent attempts by the US to stop the genocide are not exactly airtight either.
For starters, Coca-Cola, the world's largest soft-drink maker, does not purchase any gum arabic from Sudan.
"As a matter of policy, we don't disclose where we source our ingredients," said Kari Bjorhus, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola. "But we don't buy gum arabic from Sudan." Pepsi, the world's second-largest soda producer, however, refused to comment for this story.
Commerce Department documents indicate that the United States has decreased its reliance on the Sudanese product over the last several years. [More]
The administration's list of targeted firms is noteworthy for what it left out.While I welcome every attempt to deal with this ongoing tragedy, the loss of cola seems a relatively small price to pay for saving lives. And if our government doesn't understand yet that perception without substance plays badly in the Information Age, we are due for a change.
For one, the China National Petroleum, which operates in Sudan, was not included. Likewise, Sudan's government-dominated Gum Arabic will not be subjected to sanctions. The company is one of the world's largest exporters of a sticky tree resin used in hundreds of consumer products, including soft drinks and makeup. It was exempted from previous U.S. sanctions after American manufacturers said they needed Gum Arabic to continue making their products. [More]
The four governments are trying to conclude a framework this month so all 150 WTO members can work out a draft by the end of July. The Bush administration wants to use progress on the global talks to persuade Congress to renew the president's trade negotiating authority, said John Weekes, a trade adviser with Sidley Austin in Geneva.So just when everybody and their Senator are calling for farm policy reform, the US gets religion on trade which will also impact the farm bill significantly? Not if our farm lobby can help it.
The U.S. said in talks this week that it no longer expects the highest farm tariffs to be slashed by 85 percent, said the WTO's farm-talks facilitator, Crawford Falconer of New Zealand. The U.S. has agreed to scale back that demand to ``a more realistic zone,'' he said May 29.
European politics also favor a deal, as British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German Chancellor Angela Merkel try to pull together an agreement before their mandates expire. Blair, who has championed the Doha Round, plans to hand power to Gordon Brown on June 27, and Germany holds the presidency of the EU until the end of June. [More]
US farm groups have warned the Bush administration against compromising on farmers' interests as trade negotiators push intensely to broker a new world trade deal under the Doha Round.Ya gotta admire that kind of chtuzpah. Usually a warning contains an explicit "or else this happens" or at least a clear hint of some retaliation.
The warning came even as the European Union and the United States tried to pave the way for a breakthrough in global trade talks nearing a potentially make-or-break phase. [More]
The pun-laden signs you see outside churches have always intrigued me. "Seven days without prayer makes one weak." "Forbidden fruit creates many jams." "We have a prophet-sharing plan." They're funny and a little bit alien, if you're not a regular churchgoer. And it's hard to tell whether they're intended primarily to amuse regular congregants, or to attract soul-searching passers-by. Whatever the intent, such signs have certainly gained the notice of the secular world at large. There are Web sites devoted to the phenomenon—including one where you can generate your own church sign and another that envisions an amusing "church sign smackdown." And in March, Overlook Press published a book called Church Signs Across America that's being sold in, among other places, the housewares department of hipster-pop emporium Urban Outfitters. The book, by photographers Pam and Steve Paulson, features images from nearly 50 states and shows just how ubiquitous these signs have become. But where did they get their start? [More]Be sure to scroll through the slide show - very interesting.
I have friends in DK and have been there a few times. I love the country and think most American farmers would enjoy visiting them. We have much in common.
But the language is a problem - and according to this fact-filled video - not just for us.
All the Danish people I have met speak English slightly better than folks in Muncie or Branson. Which is why this spoof works so well.
[via 3quarks]
The essence of the story, as usually told, goes something like this. In the fall of 1901 J.B. Watson, Chief Engineer at the Tamarack copper mine (S. of Calumet, Mich.) suspended 4250 foot long plumb lines down mineshafts. Measurements showed that the plumb lines were farther apart at the bottom than at the top, contrary to expectations. Thus arose one of the long-standing mysteries of science. [More]
Most of the houses have obviously been newly rebuilt, with brick walls and higher roofs. (Feng Shui and the cost of land may explain why houses stay on the same plots.) This is entirely typical for the area. It's dangerous to generalise about a huge country from anecdotal evidence; still, it is evidence that at least one substantial group of Chinese peasants are doing absolutely better than before, whether or not they are falling relatively behind the city-dwellers. [More and great photos of stuff other than tourist sites]
