Earthquakes, wars, limit moves...

And my world is all about crown molding and electrical outlet replacement.

Sorry for the absence. Sooner or later I will finish or it will kill me.

Remodeling $%^&##* hiatus...

What a surprise!  Our tiny "redecorating"project has grown into a time-eating labor. No posting until I sleep in my own bed again, I would guess.

Thanks for reading.  There is so much to talk about, and I can't even find time to read much.  I would guess about 3 days.

Which means about 10.

Why our "10%" brag is mostly spin...

I've been irritated for years about the constant hammering that - thanks to us - consumers only spend 10% of their income on food.

First of all it uses AVERAGE income, which most economists think distorts the picture since nearly 2/3 of Americans earn LESS than average income.

Second, food prices are not determined for the most part by subsidized corn, wheat, etc. and when the are they are in the wrong way: dairy, sugar.

Finally, the poor (who farmers don't like to talk about much) face the problem of inelastic demand.

The financial restraints on lower-income consumers mean they have less flexibility when food and energy prices climb. Families making $15,000 to $20,000 a year use 19 percent of their after-tax income for food and those earning $20,000 to $30,000 typically use 18 percent, compared with 8 percent for families earning more than $70,000 annually, according to the Labor Department's 2009 Consumer Expenditures Survey, released October 2010. [More]

Income inequality is getting worse, so these extremes will be widening. At this rate, farmers will be talking about how lucky consumers making over $200,000 are to have our farm program, while not looking at the other 80%.

While these inequalities are not the fault of agriculture, exploiting them deceptively for self-promotion is - as my father would put it - sharp practice.

We really, really need to know more about who we serve. And care a little more.

Then addeth ye two sticks...

Stuff you never knew about the history of butter.

There is no evidence that the Romans used butter in their cuisine, (no form of butter appears in the ancient Roman cookery book Apicius) preferring olive oil, but used pure butter “medicinally”, including for making the skin “pliable” and in other situations that are too easy to imagine to be described here. Pliny suggests using it with honey for teething infants (which at least has deliciousness to recommend it) and Galen suggests using it as lamp fuel and then putting it on the eyes to cure inflammation and (presumably) sightedness. In Tablet VIII of The Epic of Gilgamesh, written some four thousand years ago, Gilgamesh makes an offering of purified butter to Shamash, the Babylonian sun god. (the gods, it was known, have no interest in milk solids). These days we usually call this sort of butter “ghee” or sometimes “clarified butter” (clarified butter, which the French quietly use a great deal in baking, has been cooked to boil off excess water, but not long enough for the milk solids to brown) to differentiate it from what we now think of as “butter,” but for millennia it was just butter.


Impure butter was viewed by the Greeks and Romans as a sure sign of barbarism and an invitation to be “civilized.” The Northern peoples were presumed to coat themselves in butter for reasons that ranged from the medicinal to the deeply troubling. The expression “as revolting as a butter-headed Burgundian” (Aussi révoltante que bourguignon avec du beurre dans ses cheveux) dates from this period, and some scholars have suggested that the French reputation for rankness is also butter-related. It was only after the fall of Rome that it slowly became acceptable to eat butter in polite company. By the Middle Ages, German and French butter fanatics would actually bribe their priests to allow them to eat butter during Lent, until, under pressure from the pro-butter Protestants, the Catholic Church allowed the consumption of butter during Lent during the 16th century. [More]

From Gilgamesh to Julia Child, butter enthusiasts have been spreading it thick. And unlike fluid milk consumption, we're eating more of it.

 [Source]

I'm not sure what happened in the mid 90's - was it a diet craze? I grew up on margarine, and actually preferred it. Jan was a butter person. Like all so many things, I soon came to align my preference with Jan's.

It's just easier that way...

[via sullivan]

Free trade saves the day?...

It's a stretch but at least one economist thinks China's savings glut is fueled by their worsening sex ratio (men/women population). Here's his logic:

The lack of a social safety net is often blamed for the high Chinese saving rate. Without welfare and government pensions the Chinese must save to self-insure themselves. But Mr Wei pointed out that even as the government has extended more social welfare programmes, the saving rate has continued to rise. He believes the uneven sex ratio can explain half of the increase in private saving between 1990 and 2005. He explained that the marriage market is becoming very competitive with so few girls. Chinese parents want to accumulate as much wealth as possible to ensure that their son can attract a wife. It is also important to provide sons with the best education possible. A competitive marriage market means that members of the disadvantaged gender must raise their game, which in China means greater wealth and education.
Mr Wei also reckons the sex ratio can explain capital accumulation in the corporate sector. The desire to accumulate wealth means that boys and their parents are more likely to become entrepreneurs, work more hours and take more unpleasant jobs. He found higher rates of entrepreneurship in areas with more skewed sex ratios.
Many different factors can explain global trade imbalances. The currency likely plays a role alongside high saving rates. But unless Chinese citizens start to consume more, a large fraction of the Chinese current-account surplus will persist. Too much saving may seem like an enviable problem, but there can be too much of a good thing. If sex ratios are as important as Mr Wei’s argues, the only way the Chinese can restore global financial order is to either import women from other countries, export men, or promote polyandry. [More]

Then if our economy is saving too little, and our sex ratio is slightly the reverse...

No, no don't tell me - I've just about got it.

Junkbox, Episode MMCD.27½...

Does remodeling cause drinking or vice versa?

• A Founding Father's advice on...er,  Founding Mothers
• Stop evolution - I want to get off.
• How to fool yourself even better
• I suggested stainless steel and aluminum
• How to use better examples
• Remember consensus? How to get there from here.

What's wrong...

With this graph?

[Source]

1. Guess which meat doesn't have a checkoff.
2. I doubt if "Be inspired" could have less effect than "TOWM"
3. If checkoffs prevented things from getting worse, how would you prove it?

Maybe producers are not even coming close to understanding the changing American diet.

We're just better, that's why...

Man, I knew this little tempest would trip triggers in farm country given our long years of selfish-steam reinforcement that farmers are the best people on the planet.

Last Friday, the Washington Post's Ezra Klein made a point in touting a book, "The Triumph of the City," to take a shot across the bow at rural America.

"The overarching theme of (Ed) Glaeser's book is that cities make us smarter, more productive and more innovative. To put it plainly, they make us richer. And the evidence in favor of this point is very, very strong. But it would of course be political suicide for President Obama to say that part of winning the future is ending the raft of subsidies we devote to sustaining rural living. And the U.S. Senate is literally set up to ensure that such a policy never becomes politically plausible." [More]

It began with this post by Ezra Klein who (unlike Clayton) followed up with a chance for Sec. Vilsack to respond. (well worth reading, BTW)

EK: Let me go back to this question of character. You said again that this is a value system that’s important to support, that this conversation begins with the fact that these people are good and hardworking. But I come from a suburb. The people I knew had good values. My mother and father are good and hardworking people. But they don’t get subsidized because they’re good and hardworking people.
TV: I think the military service piece of this is important. It’s a value system that instilled in them. But look: I grew up in a city. My parents would think there was something wrong with America if they knew I was secretary of agriculture. So I’ve seen both sides of this. And small-town folks in rural America don’t feel appreciated. They feel they do a great service for America. They send their children to the military not just because it’s an opportunity, but because they have a value system from the farm: They have to give something back to the land that sustains them.<

To being with, it was a comment about a book about cities, but if you document good aspects of cities, you automatically malign rural America, I guess.

But the evidence for the former is considerable, and the proof we are the repository of American values a little less verifiable.

The trouble is we've been in Stuart-Smalley-mode for so long we actually swallow our propaganda: country folk are better than city folk.  Which leads to an interesting problem.  When our children leave the farm to become lawyers and accountants and ice cream salesmen, do they fall away from the moral high ground? And what happens to old farmers who move to Naples? Is my son in Elmhurst less admirable than the one up the road? 

Please.

The geographic determination of virtue and values is laughable. We know we divorce, abuse, addict and sin at rates very similar to urban denizens, but those facts stand in the way of a public-relations image which justifies entitlements.

And yes, the money does pour from urban to rural in a big way. There would be no rural utilities (phones, power, roads, etc.), for one example if city folks didn't pay more so we could pay less than the real cost. Rural school are screaming for more state aid to relieve local taxpayers.  And then there are those farm subsidies...

All said, the best summary came from Joyner:

Essentially, Vilsack justifies subsiding farmers on the basis that rural America is the storehouse of our values, for which he has no evidence. And he’s befuddled when confronted with someone who doesn’t take his homilies as obvious facts.
Nobody argues that America’s farmers aren’t a vital part of our economy or denies that rural areas provide a disproportionate number of our soldiers. But the notion that country folks are somehow better people or even better Americans has no basis in reality. [More]

Ryan Avent adds that the real problem is policy debates are reduced to personal affronts, just as Clayton took it.

ONE of the most frustrating things about policy debate is the way in which arguments about efficiency are often interpreted and responded to as arguments about values. A defence of congestion pricing, for instance, will often get one labeled as anti-car. The value-oriented arguments become very intense when one makes arguments about the relative economic benefits of different kinds of places. And so it's not really suprising that an Ezra Klein post praising Ed Glaeser's work on the economic strengths of urban agglomerations hit a nerve with Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Get to talking about how cities are associated with high productivity levels and incomes, and about how urban tax revenues subsidise inefficient policies like massive agriculture subsidies, and people from rural areas may begin to feel that they're being personally slighted. What is interesting is just how hollow these complaints ring when properly addressed.
...
First, it may be that the economists who understand the economic virtues of city life aren't doing a sufficiently good job explaining that it's not the people in cities that contribute the extra economic punch; it's the cities or, more exactly, the interactions between the people cities facilitate. It's fine to love the peace of rural life. Just understand that the price of peace is isolation, which reduces productivity.
Second, the idea that economically virtuous actors deserve to be rewarded not simply with economic success but with subsidies is remarkably common in America (and elsewhere) and is not by any means a characteristic limited to rural people. I also find it strange how upset Mr Vilsack is by the fact that he "ha[s] a hard time finding journalists who will speak for them". Agricultural interests are represented by some of the most effective lobbyists in the country, but their feelings are hurt by the fact that journalists aren't saying how great they are? This reminds me of the argument that business leaders aren't investing because they're put off by the president's populist rhetoric. When did people become so sensitive? When did hurt feelings become a sufficient justification for untold government subsidies? [More]

The truth be told, this farmer suspects there are many, many people in the world better than himself. In fact, the older I get, the more the number grows. And the vast majority of them live exemplary lives in cities.

Why can't we be OK with being just as good as other people? Why is any criticism of our lifestyle forbidden?

[One final note. The disproportionate number of military from rural areas Vilsack reiterates doesn't seem to be reflected in farmer ranks. I cannot think of only a single younger farmer I know who is a veteran. The last significant batch seems to have been "semi-volunteers" like me during Viet Nam.]

The single-crop advantage...

A commenter asked my views on the recent actions by NCGA delegates to kinda, sorta nudge toward lower subsidies.

After an extended discussion and failed attempts to change the language, NCGA delegates approved via voice vote that farm programs should look at options for shifting from direct payments to better risk-management tools. The policy read: "NCGA should investigate transitioning direct payments into programs that allow producers the ability to manage risk while assuring food security."

In a 52-48 percent vote, NCGA delegates had rejected a resolution Thursday that the group would "actively pursue transitioning direct-payment dollars into a revenue-based safety net that triggers only when a loss occurs."

Pushed by the Ohio Corn and Wheat Growers Association, delegates from several states then came together to craft the language that eventually passed. NCGA delegates acknowledged they were facing a balancing act of wanting to show farmers would like to help in cutting the federal deficit but other farm groups don't want to necessarily spell out specifics of where agriculture is willing to take cuts in the safety net.

On the floor, delegate Ken McCauley of Kansas, a former NCGA president, cautioned against changing the language reached in compromise. "The original amendment is what people in D.C. told us they were looking for," McCauley said. Later, he added, "This is important and I think this is the right message of where we need to go."

Shortly later, delegates also added a separate resolution stating that NCGA believes a safety net is a combination of risk-management tools available to producers with the ability to protect farmers against revenue losses due to circumstances beyond their control. [More]

As I replied, I had left on Friday, and thought the issue was dead, according to an account from some old friends (yeah, I know - all my friends are old now).

I think this is what first steps look like, and I note it seems it was a struggle just to get this vague language included. The reluctance to give up any payment is enormous, and I commend highly the effort and result. Good on ya, mates!

That said, it is instructive to note that corn (and perhaps soy) associations probably have the only shot at making these advances. Crimony, when corn prices are over $7, and a DCP is ~$25/A, how big a hit are we talking? When all you speak for is corn farmers you have significant latitude.

Meanwhile, Farm Bureau was tied in knots when the IA delegation attempted a similar policy nudge. Populated with growers of all kinds - especially cotton - AFBF is cemented in place on policy, I'm afraid. (Although, you'd think $200 cotton might soothe any payment loss).

It is crucial to keep in mind as well how much organization staffs have at risk when you begin talking about less government intervention. Part of their job justification is brings pieces of the Washington carcass back to members.

The result is while many want to be seen taking one for the team, we also want something in return (better safety nets, etc.) In fact, I would guess what we are looking for is something like a ethanol mandate that grants enormous economic benefits without line-item funding.

The troubling aspect for me is the assumption that what we get right now is deserved, so any cuts are sacrifices. This is baloney. We are the waste and abuse we rail against.

Nonetheless, all this does not take any credit away from the courageous and hopefully example-setting result by the NCGA.

Another comment hiccup...

Don't know why this didn't post below:

Steve has left a new comment on your post "The politics of "broke"... The new fear word for ...":

You make a good point in your previous post about how it is a drop in revenues rather than a jump in spending that is causing the current problem. You imply that a better response is to increase debt rather than reduce spending.

Where I live teacher pay is significantly above the average wage for the community. Teacher average is $60,000 with benefits while average person is $30,000.

What isn't said in most of the reports is that teachers hold more degrees so a masters or a PhD is compared to others who have the same educational level. When compared that way, the teacher is receiving average compensation. But since most others in the community do not have such degrees, they receive less compensation but the reports say they each receive the same amount when adjusted for educational level. Keep in mind, that there is no correlation between educational level and teaching ability. There is a correlation level between education and compensation though. So a teacher has significant financial incentive to amass educational credits during summers and the frequent in-service days even though it doesn't appear to help them teach better.

Gates on Compensation

To be fair, the community is becoming feudal in nature with the 20% who are land owners becoming wealthy while the 80% who do not own land having a hard time keeping up.

Where I live, the union has negotiated a guaranteed 5% return on the pensions and required that the State employees and teachers pension funds be invested in the stock market with the public employees pensions getting any greater return that the stock market might provide but with a 5% floor. The taxpayer makes up the difference if the stock market goes down.

In addition, the union has used the collective bargaining process to leapfrog compensation each year. Anytime someone's compensation is below average then they go to the arbitrator/court and have their compensation moved to average or above. Nothing the local board can do. That moves the other half below average, so they repeat the process. At any point in time, half are below average and have a complaint to file.

The unions by themselves are not breaking the Country. But they have managed to create a system that is inflexible, protects poorly performing people, costs more, and is the primary financial supporter of one political party and opponent of any kind of limit on taxes.

The process to fire a teacher in Illinois according to the Chicago Tribune.

Steps to Fire a Teacher

Steve:  I do not argue your points, and when Jan was president of the school board in our tiny district, it struck me as absurd all the work necessary just to keep the place running.

But my point is do we actually expect these essentially economic and efficiency reforms to make any difference in our abysmal educational outcome? If we're already struggling to attract high quality entrants now, as referenced in the excerpt below, those actions certainly don't strike me as corrective.

I really don't know what reform is needed to make our educational results better, and I also think this is really bad for our future. Leaving a broken educational system could be even worse than leaving a deficit.

Re your other point: I did not mean to imply debt THE solution to the exclusion of other remedies. In fact, I think starting with the Bowles-Simpson plan our best bet. It recognizes the importance of long term deficit reduction and also the tenuous nature of our recovery. Slashing federal programs at the same time state layoffs are dragging down employment is not a bad idea, but bad timing. Again, the bond market tells us the level of urgency needed. What is of primary importance is growth to return revenue to former levels.

I also think tax expenditures to be the place to cut first (after the wars). (Yeah - I'm talking about Sec 179, bonus depreciation, etc.) I would also welcome a return to Reagan-era tax rates.

Sorry about the foul-up.

The politics of "broke"...

The new fear word for deficit hawks is broke.  And they can't utter it often enough.

House Speaker John Boehner routinely offers this diagnosis of the U.S.’s fiscal condition: “We’re broke; Broke going on bankrupt,” he said in a Feb. 28 speech in Nashville.
Boehner’s assessment dominates a debate over the federal budget that could lead to a government shutdown. It is a widely shared view with just one flaw: It’s wrong.
“The U.S. government is not broke,” said Marc Chandler, global head of currency strategy for Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. in New York. “There’s no evidence that the market is treating the U.S. government like it’s broke.”
The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007. Financial products that pay off if Uncle Sam defaults aren’t attracting unusual investor demand. And tax revenue as a percentage of the economy is at a 60-year low, meaning if the government needs to raise cash and can summon the political will, it could do so.
To be sure, the U.S. confronts long-term fiscal dangers. Over the past two years, federal debt measured against total economic output has increased by more than 50 percent and the White House projects annual budget deficits continuing indefinitely.
“If an American family is spending more money than they’re making year after year after year, they’re broke,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner.
A person, company or nation would be defined as “broke” if it couldn’t pay its bills, and that is not the case with the U.S. Despite an annual budget deficit expected to reach $1.6 trillion this year, the government continues to meet its financial obligations, and investors say there is little concern that will change.[More]

It is the equating of a sovereign nation to a household that creates this misapplication of the concept, I think. That and a poor understanding of public finance. 

Still, as has been pointed out by experts like Bruce Bartlett, and the above article, there is no argument in the bond market. To be sure, predicting higher interest rates is a sure winner if you don't specify at time, but we've already got plenty of commodity analysts working that angle (Better buy options!!).

It will be interesting to see how effective this demagoguery to achieve what are essentially targeted attacks against political foes, such as we see with teacher unions. It looks like union-busting may be on a roll, despite public sentiment in the other direction, and screaming "broke" will be one of the tools used. In the case of states, it is actually a more accurate term, but again the test is bond ratings.

What I'm trying to figure out is how our school system will adapt to this. We're already recruiting below the top for teaching (not all teachers, of course, but in general) and wiping out collective bargaining, possibly tenure, and other perks probably will accentuate that trend.

The second thing I know for sure is that we'll never attract the kind of talented young people we need to the teaching profession unless it pays far more than it does today. With starting teacher salaries averaging $39,000 nationally, and rising to an average maximum of $67,000, it's no surprise that we draw teachers from the bottom two-thirds of the college class; for schools in poor neighborhoods, teachers come largely from the bottom third. We're the only leading nation that thinks it can stay a leading nation with a "strategy" of recruiting mediocre students and praying they'll prove excellent teachers.

And I know one more thing - which is as inconvenient for me to acknowledge as it should be for others who've criticized archaic teacher union practices in the United States. The highest-performing school systems in the world - in places such as Finland, Singapore and South Korea - all have strong teachers unions. Anyone serious about improving American schooling has to reckon with this paradox: Unions here are often obstacles to needed reform, even as the world's best systems work hand in glove with their unions to continually improve their performance. [More of a helpful article]

 I really don't have much affinity for unions per se, but cannot agree they represent the threat currently being attached to them. This looks like a group-scapegoating, and blatantly politically targeted. Plus it may backfire - nothing like an attack to rally the troops.

Lost in all this is what it means longer term for a government to turn pretty harshly on its own workers and how that suggests it will function in the future. Like Shakespeare's suggestion to "Kill all the laywers", tactics like this are really just good for applause or laughs on stage, not public policy, IMHO.

Our own worst enemy...

All the posturing and angry rhetoric about the federal budget is almost certainly ensuring we don't make any progress for 2-3 years to come. The reason is the legislative process and especially freshman legislator ignorance of it.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, unless Congress comes together on a budget resolution, it’s almost impossible to make significant progress on cutting entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The reason? A completed budget resolution is necessary to enable a special legislative procedure called reconciliation.
Reconciliation allows Congress to force itself to cut spending. In the budget resolution, congressional committees must report legislation that would cut spending or raise revenues, neither of which they like to do. If they fail to act, however, the Budget Committee can circumvent them. This tends to force the hands of the traditional committees of jurisdiction.
The Budget Act provides for expedited procedures in both the House and Senate for consideration of legislation that arises through reconciliation. The legislation may not be filibustered in the Senate. There is a fixed time available for debate, established by law, and the final legislation only requires a simple majority. This is critical, given that Republicans routinely filibuster everything in the Senate and it requires 60 votes to limit debate.
Needless to say, it would be a simple matter for Senate Democrats to play the Republican game and filibuster any big budget-cutting bill sent over by the House even if Democrats didn’t control the Senate. So reconciliation is absolutely essential if Republicans expect to make good on their promises to slash spending and balance the budget. That’s why it’s necessary to have a completed budget resolution agreed to by both the House and Senate; both must agree on spending levels and reconciliation instructions.
And this is why almost every budget expert in Washington believes that Republicans are being extraordinarily foolish, even childish, in wasting so much of Congress’ precious time on the 2011 budget. The potential for significant savings is inherently limited when almost half the fiscal year is past and two-thirds of total spending is off-limits.
Is Simple Ignorance to Blame?
If they had any sense, Republicans should have accepted that it was too late to do much of anything about the 2011 budget the day Congress reconvened in January and put all of their energy into the 2012 budget, including a binding budget resolution with reconciliation instructions. But because they’re still finishing leftover business from last year, they are going to be severely behind the 8-ball in terms of doing what needs to be done to both finish the 2012 appropriations on time or do anything about entitlements.
I think it’s mostly simple ignorance about how the budget process works that is preventing House Republican freshmen from accepting that they simply can’t do everything they promised they would to rein in spending right now. House veterans know that the freshmen have bitten off more than they can chew, but are too frightened of retaliation by the Tea Party to say so. In a few months, when the freshmen have finally exhausted themselves with futile efforts to balance the budget instantly, they’re going to greatly regret that they didn’t develop a long-term plan and properly use the budget process, which was created to do exactly what they claim they want to do: get the nation’s finances in order.
[More]

I'm taking no joy in this grim forecast, even though I think it is not the best economic path to follow right now. Austerity budgets from the states may be enough to tip us back into recession. But I do fault debt crusaders for failing to understand their job and instead simply sloganeering.

It turns at that obstructionism isn't good training for actually accomplishing anything. True, we may starve several programs or agency like the EPA, but even that doesn't appear to be well thought out. For example, meat inspectors will be cut right when our protein sector is struggling with nosebleed feed costs.

"Congress isn't changing law requiring constant presence of inspectors in slaughter plants and daily in processing," noted Tucker-Foreman, in an email response to Food Safety News. "In a desire to meet commitment to produce big cuts in budget fast they're setting up collision between irresistible force (campaign promises) and immoveable object (the current law)."

"It's bad news for consumers," said Tucker-Foreman. "Disruptions in inspection are likely to increase risk of contamination and could push up prices."

Tucker-Foreman added that reduced inspection could hurt meat processing plants and impact stakeholders further up the supply chain.

"Bad for farmers and ranchers who won't be able to get animals inspected and will have to keep feeding them [and it's] a special threat to small processing plants," she added.

One FSIS inspector, who is not authorized to speak on behalf of the agency, expressed similar concerns.

"On the inspection side, we'll see increased workloads due to unfilled vacancies at plants needing coverage. We already have more inspectors retiring than we're hiring," wrote the inspector in an email. "We won't be able to focus attention where it's needed because we'll feel like we don't have the time."

The inspector also noted that small plants could be disparately impacted. "Small plants that only work two days a week might not get covered. If there's no inspector, they can't run... Jobs will be lost."[More]

The axe-wielding budget hawks are ignoring where cuts must come from (entitlements), and also that our budget problem is complicated by plunging revenues more than out of control spending.

  

[Source] 

Cutting our way back to recession will powerfully increase that problem.

Bottom line: more smoke, little fire.

Take a breath, cowboy...

If you want to see what cable-TV ranting has done to opinion writing, consider this jeremiad from a rodeo aficionado.

It’s time to man the Ramparts: Our Western Heritage is Under Attack
Guy Weadick and Pat Burns who were instrumental in organizing the first Calgary Stampede in 1912 must be rolling over in their graves with the most recent announcement about how the Rangeland Derby is being changed to placate those most of whom unfortunately, wouldn’t know the front end of an Angus Steer from the back end of a pick up truck. We are now going to have two outriders and not the four that we have had for time eternal in the Chuckwagon Races, and for all the wrong reasons. To those who made the decisions, if you think that this is the end of the battle about what a Rodeo or more specifically what the Rangeland Derby should look like you are sadly mistaken. This is only one small minute battle that a select group has once again won in the real war that is being waged and that ultimate goal is I believe to totally ban all Rodeos from existence.
It’s time to say enough is enough. It’s amazing how history repeats itself. In September of 1938, Neville Chamberlain, Prime Minister of the England, returned from Germany after signing the Munich Agreement with Hitler. The Munich Agreement gave the Sudetenland (a Czech territorial possession) to Germany on the premise that this would end Germany’s aspirations. This agreement was reached without
Czech input by Britain and France who wanted to avoid war at all cost. Remember how Chamberlain waved the document while debarking the airplane that returned him from Germany, all the while smiling and saying “Peace in our Time?” The ink wasn’t even dry on the document before Hitler invaded Poland, the event that kick started World War Two. The failed strategy caused Chamberlain to leave office in disgrace to make way for the British Bulldog Winston Churchill, but the damage had been done, and millions would die in the succeeding conflict. The reason that the Munich Agreement was a train wreck was that the European Powers failed to realize what Hitler’s true agenda was and what his ultimate objective from the start entailed. In short, Hitler played the other European powers very successfully and they ended up fighting a far more major conflict than would have been the case had they had the backbone to stop Hitler dead in his tracks early on.
Sacrificing one’s principles didn’t work then and it doesn’t work any better now. The well financed groups that incessantly challenge our rights and privileges to a rural way of life are not going away. They will not rest until they have achieved their ultimate goal which is to totally and completely decimate our ability to lead the life that we have all chosen. Do we have a right to protect our heritage? Do we have a right to protect our way of life? Do others have the right to superimpose their value systems on us? I say not now and not ever. If you continue to allow these groups to chip away at those things that we cherish and value then we will wake up some morning and those things will be gone forever, not only for us but for our children and grandchildren. I for one am sick and tired of being castigated for my treatment of animals. [More, and the hysteria only mounts as he takes his arguments to absurd predicted extremes]

Now it could be that I am misreading a pathetically bad attempt at sarcasm. If that the case, this cowboy should stick to their famed poetry.

But obviously he is unaware of Godwin's Law when invoking Hitler.

There are many corollaries to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by being adopted by Godwin himself)^[3] than others.^[1] For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically "lost" whatever debate was in progress. This principle itself is frequently referred to as Godwin's law. It is considered poor form to raise such a comparison arbitrarily with the motive of ending the thread. There is a widely recognized corollary that any such ulterior-motive invocation of Godwin's law will be unsuccessful. [More]

I don't even know what the "outrider" issue is, but I'm willing to bet it is not the End of Civilization he describes. And it is fair to point out I don't have much in common with this profession.

Still when all you have to get strung out about is rodeo rules,  it is a powerful argument that Canada is pretty good place to be living right now.

What's the difference...

Between a farmer and a canoe.

Answer: a canoe will occasionally tip.

[Click to make readable]

[via sullivan]

Access to knowledge...

I continue to be blown away by the power of the Internet (and Google) to improve my life.

Exhibit A:  When we built our home, we had the shell erected and did the finish work ourselves. At that age (30) I was supremely confident I could handle the carpentry, plumbing, electrical, etc.   Heck, I was an engineer.

Of course, these are trades, and using the tools and materials of the times, experience was a much bigger component of success. But the house got finished and has served well for 30+ years.

In the process of replacing the carpet on the stairs, I noticed that I had installed the treads and risers wrong. I found out after searching for "stair construction" and comparing the advice with my work. Perhaps I could have found this out by a book or from a carpenter back in 1978, but I thought I was doing it right. And it was pretty close, and has sufficed.

But my first instinct now when faced with a fixing problem is to download knowledge. In a matter of seconds, my abilities are multiplied.

I don't think the full effect of this phenomenon is close to being realized, but as many observers are pointing out, the result is not to increase incomes, but lower costs. In this case, the Internet delivered free what an experienced carpenter used to provide for $25/hr. or so.

In don't think farming is exempt from this "value predation". Nor are our vendors. Knowledge given freely makes many jobs lower valued, simply because much of their product was "knowing where to hit", as the old joke goes.

This could be an underlying reason behind the jobless recoveries we have been suffering. Perhaps too many jobs were based on closed information systems.

Whatever.

I've got stairs to fix.

In a fit of spring enthusiasm...

I replied to Jan, "Let's do it now!"

The question?* "When would be a good time to replace the master bedroom and hall carpet, along with a new subfloor and white baseboard and casement trim?"

Don't look for regular posts. Our remodeling projects are to the death.

Meanwhile, the demolition phase is getting a little out of hand...

*Shame on many of you. We're old married Methodists.

Great Ad...



Silly as it is, it is a reminder of the intensifying linkage between animals and humans.

Junkbox, Episode GMT...

Tile are running. I've started too.

• Very good, albeit technical, estate tax blog.
• Then: JOBS. Now: jobs.
• So we just upgraded from RTK to turtle.
• Only McDonald's could over-research oatmeal
• Health insurance reform and entrepreneurs
• An interesting meat/food debate

It actually never occurred to me...

I might be right about the Chinese yuan and their food problem.  But guess who supports appreciation in their currency all of a sudden?

China’s yuan traded near a 17-year high after Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said a stronger currency will benefit the nation’s economy.
While the appreciation will be gradual, strength is beneficial as it curbs inflation, Wen said yesterday in an online interview with citizens. The government has set an annual economic growth target of 7 percent for the five-year period through 2015, compared with 7.5 percent for the preceding five years, Wen said. [More]

Commodities just got a little cheaper for some.

[Note also the slower growth targets.]

Amen Twofer...

First, Ryan Avent says what I mean about the impending government shutdown.

What really makes this so upsetting, and it's really, genuinely upsetting, is that these proposed cuts are basically useless. America doesn't face a short-term fiscal crisis; its debt is dirt cheap. America faces a long-term fiscal crisis due to projected increases in government health spending. So Republicans are cutting short-term discretionary spending to address a fiscal crisis that doesn't exist while ignoring the fiscal crisis that does exist. Their proposed cuts aren't emerging from any cost-benefit analysis; rather they seem designed to spare GOP interests at the expense of Democratic interests. And to do this, they're prepared to—potentially—cost the American economy 2 percentage points of growth.
It's really remarkable. It's remarkable how things have deteriorated in so short a time. Last year, the president's bipartisan deficit commission recommended deficit cuts that didn't focus on the short-term, and that did put defence and entitlements on the table. Now Republicans are declaring that they'll shut down the government unless all of their demands are met—demands with virtually no redeeming value. This is no way to govern. No way at all. [More]

Next, Will Wilkinson hammers it on the WI union flap.

There’s something about the union demonstrations in Madison, and the excitement it has caused on the left, that reminds me of the Tea Party. I think I’ve figured it out what it is. The advent of the labor movement is at the heart of the left’s sacred creation myth. The sense on the left that unions are under siege gives them something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority. Similarly, the sense on the right that America’s foundational values are under siege gave the Tea Party something to fight for with a bracing sense of historically-rooted identity and moral authority. Of course, the Tea Party has about as much to do with the values of the American founding as John Adams has to do with Raytheon, and public-sector unionism has about as much to do with preventing worker exploitation as Eugene Debs has to do with unfireable $100,000 a year public-school teachers. But it’s nice to have a team, and a noble lineage, and to get out there and really give the bastards who are stealing our country hell. [Source - but...ahem, I sorta lifted the whole post]

What they said. 

I got nothin' to add.

China, ctd....

Did some surfing on my own and found this re: heavy metal pollution and grain in China. This appears to be Kevin's source.

[Update]

Here's more on the problem.

 Meanwhile, both central government agencies and local governments in charge of areas with heavy metal pollution remained silent.

All this shrugging-off is unacceptable. It’s a fact that excessive levels of cadmium were found in rice grown in several areas, and the public had the right to be informed.

It’s true cadmium poisoning is not as dangerous as, say, cyanide. And contamination levels found so far have not been too much higher than the levels considered safe. But these arguments are outweighed by the widely recognized danger to human health posed by the accumulation of cadmium in the body. In fact, heavy metal poisoning tends to be chronic, and any clinical evidence may take years to surface.

Already, we’ve seen cases of heavily polluted rice fields in some areas of the Guangxi region and Hunan Province. Some villages in these areas have reported local citizens with symptoms of cadmium poisoning. Meanwhile, rice is still being grown in paddies laced with cadmium. It’s also being sold and eaten in those areas.

Thus, government inaction in the face of this toxic threat has – and continues to – put human health at risk. And the public should be made aware of the wider problem of heavy metals polluting the nation’s farms. Not only cadmium but also by other toxic metals such as lead, arsenic, mercury, copper and zinc may be tainting the nation’s rice as well as other crops.

China has given a lot of attention to food safety in recent years. But soil pollution is the greatest threat to the nation’s food safety. Even the government’s environmental protection authorities have conceded this fact. Up to 12 million tons of grain are estimated to be tainted by heavy metals every year, costing the economy more than 20 billion yuan. Human health is jeopardized as harmful substances from polluted soil make their way into crops and our bodies, causing disease.

All this heavy metal pollution has persisted due to prolonged government failure to act. Tackling soil pollution is difficult, but authorities should not use technical hurdles as an excuse to ignore the problem. Nor should they hide the truth or play down the problem for fear of public panic. Instead, government officials should take advantage of this new spike in interest to review their environment, farm and food management practices, and then take a holistic approach to tackling the problem. [More]

As you can tell from the above source (read the whole article) this event will be used to buttress the case against industrial agriculture and many modern farming techniques in favor of agrarian ag.  But you can't get much more agrarian than China right now.

What is suggests to me is we may be picking exactly the wrong time to decide we are victims of too much environmental regulation. All of our carping about the costs of compliance will seem pretty petty when confronted with a public that wants to know how we will prevent such a mess here in the US.

Chinese history you need to know...

Right now. I am finishing Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter. It is an appalling account of the social and economic consequences on the insane "Great Leap Forward" in the late 1950's and early 1960's. It is not an easy read as the author painstaking documents absolutely horrendous accounts of starvation, stupidity, corruption, death on an imaginable scale, etc.  [I believe I have also recommended a much earlier book about that same event: Alive in a Bitter Sea.]

But this week's market action and these remarks by Kevin Van Trump prompted me to add to my speculation about China, food and the immediate future.

MUST READ...China's Years Of Pollution Could Actually Cost Them A Huge Portion Of Their Crop
China's poor farming practices and years of polluting their land may have finally caught up with them.  The news is just starting to surface, but from what I was told last night millions of acres of Chinese farmland could actually be polluted with heavy metals.  The Chinese government may have actually know of the problem since 2007, but have been able to keep a tight lid on things until now.  Sources claim that 12 million tons of grain may actually need to be destroyed or may have already been destroyed in the past few months.  The story circulating is that China had been pressed to build massive irrigations systems several years back to eliminate ongoing drought issues.  The land and water sources where the water was pulled from was later found to be highly polluted with heavy metals and other toxic substance.  The authorities, at all levels, have tried to hide the problem even though cases of pollution and pollution-related diseases, above all in children, have been breaking out like wildfire.  There have been documents uncovered that former Land Minister Sun Wensheng warned the government in 2007 that at least 10% of China's 295 million acres of farmland were actually contaminated by heavy metals, toxic pollutants, and cancer-causing cadmium.  Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Environment Minister Zhou Shengxian were put on the spot and have promised to start some type of clean-up campaigns after admitting that metal poisoning had become much worse than they had ever anticipated.  Supposedly the Environment Ministry, yesterday announced on its website a plan to tackle pollution in 14 heavily affected provinces.  However, in typical Chinese political fashion it refused to provide any details about how much damage and how extensive the problem has become.  The plan and details of the problem are still being considered a national secret.  If this is true it could certainly be the "smoking gun" that China has been trying to cover up, and could ultimately let the cat out of the bag.  If it hasn't happened yet, I can almost guarantee you China's poor environmental practices will ultimately catch up with them.  

(Kevin doesn't offer any links to this, but I've e-mailed him for any source he can share.)

Anyway, match that up with these passages from MGF:

Mao's Great Famine (Frank Dikötter)
- Highlight Loc. 998-1005 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 10:27 PM

But most of the time buildings made of mud and straw were torn down to provide nutrients for the soil. Walls of buildings where animals had lived and especially where they had urinated, such as stables, could provide useful fertiliser. At first old walls and abandoned huts were destroyed, but as the campaign gained momentum entire rows of houses were systematically razed to the ground, the mud bricks shattered and strewn across the fields. In Macheng, nestled against the south of the Dabie mountain range in Hubei, thousands of houses were demolished to collect fertiliser. In January 1958 the model county was exalted by Wang Renzhong, party secretary of the province, for reaching a rice yield of six tonnes per hectare: ‘Let Us Learn from Macheng!’ the People’s Daily declared rapturously. Once it had been praised by Mao for its experimental plots, Macheng became a shrine.
==========
Mao's Great Famine (Frank Dikötter)
- Highlight Loc. 1005-14 | Added on Sunday, February 06, 2011, 10:28 PM

In the following months it attracted half a million cadres, including Zhou Enlai, foreign minister Chen Yi and Li Xiannian. By August a new record was achieved with a yield of 277 tonnes of rice per hectare: ‘The Era of Miracles!’ the propaganda machine proclaimed.18 On the ground the pressure was unremitting, wild boasts and false figures vying for attention. In one Macheng commune the head of the Women’s Federation took the lead by moving out of her house and allowing it to be turned into fertiliser: within two days 300 houses, fifty cattle pens and hundreds of chicken coops had been pulled down. By the end of the year some 50,000 buildings had been destroyed.19 Trying to outdo one another, other communes throughout the country followed suit. In Dashi, Guangdong, a commune that also attracted nationwide attention with its ‘Twenty-five-Tonne Grain University’ and ‘Five-Thousand-Kilo Field’, local cadres pulverised half of all houses in Xi’er.20 Other organic matter found its way into the fields: in parts of Jiangsu province, the land was covered in white sugar.
==========
Mao's Great Famine (Frank Dikötter)
- Highlight Loc. 3494-3506 | Added on Monday, February 21, 2011, 01:38 PM

Throughout the country the irrigation projects, built by hundreds of millions of farmers at great human and economic cost, were for the main part useless or downright dangerous. Many violated the laws of nature, resulting in soil erosion, landslides and river siltation. We saw how in Hunan, a province blessed with fertile soil, river valleys and terraced fields, lush mountains covered with primeval forest were defaced by local communes during the steel drive. The denuded mountains were washed bare by torrents, since there was no longer a canopy to intercept rainwater. As the capacity of forests to retain water was degraded, natural hazards were amplified into disasters. Large irrigation projects that had disrupted the natural flow of water with stopbanks, culverts, reservoirs and irrigation channels only aggravated matters. Accumulated deposits heightened the bed of local rivers in Hunan by up to 80 centimetres, so that water threatened to spill over and flood the neighbouring villages.39 Local reclamation projects made things worse. Launched by the state and local communes in response to food shortages, they showed little sense of stewardship of nature. In Hunan over 100,000 hectares were opened up, much of it on steep mountain slopes. The rain then flushed the soil and took it to the newly built reservoirs, choking them with sediment. One team in Longhui reclaimed ten hectares on a gradient against the mountain: the runoff from torrential rain in May 1962 took enough soil to silt up thirty dams and five roads.40

[BTW, these are what clippings look like when uploaded from a Kindle. The numbers are footnote numbers that lose formatting.]

For some reason I am fascinated by this period as it was a time when I was just beginning to be exposed to world events via The Weekly Reader. I remember reading about the GLF at the time, so I assume the Chinese did a masterful job of telling about the scope of their incredible and stupefyingly illogical programs.

Please also listen to my commentary on USFR this next week as I add in Hu's own biography (he's an engineer, for one thing) to my earlier remarks to guess what might be going through his mind right now. Also keep in mind he can remember the horror of the GLF firsthand.

Lost comment...

I dunno what's going on with Blogger, but a recent comment by Derek on this post doesn't show up on my browser. (The "Recent Comments" section is a little funky too.)

Here it is:

Here is an interactive map I found of large (I assume CAFO) livestock operations across the U.S. You can even click on counties. Yes, the intent is questionable, but it does show interesting trends.

The map is pretty interesting. Check it out. Here is the map for broilers, for example.

But the intriguing thing for me is his phrase "intent is questionable". While I don't want to presume his meaning nor pick an argument, it is a common reaction to an obviously anti-big-farm website. But does intent really matter if the information is correct?

Farmers dismiss information depending on the source, not the quality. Al Gore could utter eternal truths and every word would be suspect. Yet for all the spluttering about the EWG subsidy database, I have never seen one criticism that the data or the presentation are inaccurate.

You can't demand sound-science based decisions if what you really support origin-approved facts.

The evidence for epistemic closure in agriculture continues to pile up.

Not quite a total time-suck...

But close. Check out this interactive map of counties that displays dozens of different demographic, economic and ag statistics. This one shows percent of farm operators over 65, for example.

[Click to embiggen]

Powerful graphics tools like this often show patterns, trends, oddities, and simple surprises you would not notice in a table of numbers. Here's a population rate of change showing how IL counties are essentially depopulating unless you have a university, medical or other government powerhouse - or are a collar county.

 

The more I use tools like this, the less I am certain about my own home and community. We see it from too close up for real perspective.

Find your own revelatory map and send me a screen shot/link and I'll post it.

Imagine you are Hu Jintao right now...

Things have been going freakin' great. I mean, China's growth rate is the envy of the world, you've got more dollars than Bernanke stashed away, and your economic problems are relatively minor.

Or were.

First of all, even with your control of the state owned media, you realize Twit happens (to leak through). Now as your anxious comrades are calling you to share, it seems popular opinion about authoritarian regimes has dropped a little in the polls lately.

Skittish domestic security officials responded with a mass show of force across China on Sunday after anonymous calls for protesters to stage a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution” went out over social media and microblogging outlets.
Although there were no reports of large demonstrations, the outsize government response highlighted China’s nervousness at a time of spreading unrest in the Middle East aimed at overthrowing authoritarian governments.
The words “Jasmine Revolution,” borrowed from the successful Tunisian revolt, were blocked on sites similar to Twitter and on Internet search engines, while cellphone users were unable to send out text messages to multiple recipients. A heavy police presence was reported in several Chinese cities.
In recent days, more than a dozen lawyers and rights activists have been rounded up, and more than 80 dissidents have reportedly been placed under varying forms of house arrest. At least two lawyers are still missing, family members and human rights advocates said Sunday.
In Beijing, a huge crowd formed outside a McDonald’s in the heart of the capital on Sunday after messages went out listing it as one of 13 protest sites across the country. It is not clear who organized the campaign, but it first appeared Thursday on Boxun, a Chinese-language Web site based in the United States, and then spread through Twitter and other microblogging services.
By 2 p.m., the planned start of the protests, hundreds of police officers had swarmed the area, a major shopping district popular with tourists.
At one point, the police surrounded a young man who had placed a jasmine flower on a planter outside the McDonald’s, but he was released after the clamor drew journalists and photographers.
In Shanghai, three people were detained during a skirmish in front of a Starbucks, The Associated Press reported. One post on Twitter described a heavily armed police presence on the subways of Shenzhen, and another claimed that officials at Peking University in Beijing had urged students to avoid any protests, but those reports were impossible to verify Sunday.
The messages calling people to action urged protesters to shout, “We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness,” an ostensible effort to tap into popular discontent over inflation and soaring real estate prices. [More]

Your attention focuses on the protesters' first demand, but then you remember the inconvenient truth just whispered to you recently by your agricultural advisers: the crop isn't good.

The Chinese government has said the country's worst drought in decades is likely to continue, putting the winter wheat harvest at risk.

The Ministry of Agriculture said the drought had worsened in some wheat-growing regions despite snowfalls.
Large swathes of China have had almost no rain since October, affecting millions of hectares of crops and leaving many short of drinking water.
Analysts say crop shortages in China could affect prices around the world.
The country's central bank is offering emergency loans for drought-relief projects in northern, central and eastern areas.
Officials are trying to calm fears over shortages, saying the country has enough in reserve to meet demand.
But food prices have been rising quickly in China for months - and people are grumbling, says the BBC's Michael Bristow in Beijing.
China's leaders will not want this latest drought to push prices even higher, our correspondent says.
Last month, the authorities pledged $15bn (£9.4bn; 98.6bn yuan) in support to help farmers cope with the effect of the drought.
Forecasters say the dry weather could continue well into the spring. [More]

Suddenly the urgency of maintaining exports by artificially keeping the yuan cheap runs headfirst into the vision of a Tienanmen-Square version of Tahrir Square.

I'm thinking you keep buying commodities - all of 'em. And you let the yuan creep up to make the cost lower. And you let the factory owners lump it.

After only five years...

I've learned how to embed a link into a comment.

There is life in this old brain after all.

What we're not talking about...

When we talk about health care reform: access to insurance. While many are adamant about being forced to buy insurance, this problem really is trivial compared to the other extreme.

My husband, teenage daughter and I were all active and healthy, and I naïvely thought getting health insurance would be simple.

Why did we even need insurance? First, we wanted to know that, if we had a medical catastrophe, we would not exhaust our savings. Second, uninsured patients are billed more than the rates that insurers negotiate with doctors and hospitals, and we wanted to pay those lower rates. The difference is significant: my recent M.R.I. cost $1,300 at the “retail” rate, while the rate negotiated by the insurance company was $700.

An insurance broker helped me sort through the options. I settled on a high-deductible plan, and filled out the long application. I diligently listed the various minor complaints for which we had been seen over the years, knowing that these might turn up later and be a basis for revoking coverage if they were not disclosed.

Then the first letter arrived — denied. It never occurred to me that we would be denied! Yes, we had listed a bunch of minor ailments, but nothing serious. No cancer, no chronic diseases like asthma or diabetes, no hospital stays.

Why were we denied? What were these pre-existing conditions that put us into high-risk categories? For me, it was a corn on my toe for which my podiatrist had recommended an in-office procedure. My daughter was denied because she takes regular medication for a common teenage issue. My husband was denied because his ophthalmologist had identified a slow-growing cataract. Basically, if there is any possible procedure in your future, insurers will deny you.

The broker then proposed that the three of us make individual applications. Perhaps one or two of us might be accepted, rather than the family as a group.

As I filled out more applications, I discovered a critical error in my strategy. The first question was “Have you ever been denied health insurance”? Now my answer was yes, giving the new companies reason to be wary of my application. I learned too late that the best tactic is to apply simultaneously to as many companies as possible, so that you don’t have to admit to a denial.

I completed four applications for each of the three of us, using reams of paper. I learned to read the questions carefully. I mulled over the difference between a “condition” and “something for which you have sought treatment.” I was precise and succinct. I felt as if I was doing a deposition: Give the minimum true information, and not a word more. I was accepted by exactly one insurance company. So was my daughter, although at a 50 percent premium over the standard charge for a girl her age. My husband was also accepted by one insurer but was denied by the company that approved me.

Our premiums, which were reasonable at first, have increased substantially over the last six years; the average annual increase has been 20 percent. I now am paying premiums that are more than double what they were initially. And because these are high-deductible policies, we still are paying most of the medical bills ourselves.

The new health care reform legislation is not perfect. Nothing that complex could be. But I have no doubt that the system is broken and reform is absolutely essential. If we are not going to have universal coverage but are going to rely on employer plans, then we must offer individuals, self-employed people and small businesses a place to purchase insurance at a reasonable price. [More]

Been there, done that. And I would hazard a guess that anyone who has tried to get individual coverage in the last few years is highly likely to support some form of universal coverage divorced from employment.

Watching the union-busting efforts in WI generates mixed feelings for me. While I am not a big fan of unions, I don't think having an equal-sized opponent to bargain with say, Ford is a bad idea. But ending public employee unions could have a surprisingly harsh backlash for farmers.

I know of several uninsurable, very successful farmers whose wife's teaching job is singularly about health insurance coverage. Any cracks in the benefit packages for public employees could be disproportionately felt in rural areas where small businesses seldom offer coverage, or if they do, less compared to local and state government.

When coverage is lost for any reason, it's amazing how quickly many come to embrace some change from the status quo for health insurance in America. While there seems to be a feeling we can simply mandate insurability and not coverage, the insurance industry cannot tolerate that added expense without new customers.

There are several ways around mandating coverage, and they are looking more credible as the debate intensifies. But stories like the above will resonate with more voters, and like Medicare recipients, their political stances could become more flexible.

So long, jet jockeys...

As a submariner, I developed a lifelong antipathy to pilots, especially Navy pilots. Half-athlete and all-ego, they took arrogance as a primary virtue simply because they routinely accomplish stupefying feats of coordination and daring, such as landing on a carrier in high seas.

Underwater-nerds loathed them and their macho allure to women.

But the military of the future won't need these glamorous heroes very much, and when they do go aloft, their risks will be much worse than usual. To begin with, we're rapidly switching expensive fighters for cheap drones "piloted" by gamers is a basement somewhere.

The recent meteoric rise of UAV development, highlights an issue of the growing importance of UAVs in the future and leads to the corollary issue of whether UAVs will replace manned aircraft’s roles and missions.  The bottom line is that the Services still need an organic capability for a continuous, on-demand, all-weather platform to provide intelligence on the battlefield. In addition, the Services must execute these operations quickly, safely, and cheaply.  As such, UAVs may be a significant part of the answer since they have proven their combat mettle in Operations DESERT SHIELD, DESERT STORM, and now Bosnia.  Once a strike capability is fielded, then the manned aircraft community will be really threatened.  UAVs will continue to replace manned aircraft in many areas, but only time and technology will tell how much. [More]

Even when we do need full-sized planes, they won't need jockeys either.

The X-47B is a unmanned fighter sized aircraft developed by U.S. firm, Northrop Grumman. The vehicle is just a test bed but is hoped will lead to an eventual unmanned fighter aircraft. The past decade has seen a dramatic increase in the use of UAV’s (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) but thus far most UAV’s have been fairly primitive and used priarily only for recon or light strike support. Nothing designed thus far has really had the ability or purpose to replaced manned aircraft. The X-47B is a prototype which if successful will lead to the eventual replacement of manned aircraft in the United States Navy. [More]

But the real coup de grace will be the weapons they are up against. Dogfights with laser defenders aren't really movie-ready drama - they're split second target practice. And that very real possibility just became more possible.

Translated from the Nerd: Thanks to Hernandez, the Navy will now have a more powerful death ray aboard a future ship sooner than expected, in order to burn incoming missiles out of the sky or zap through an enemy vessel's hull.

"Five hundred [kilovolts] has been the project goal for a long time," says George Neil, the FEL associate director at Jefferson Labs, whose Rav 4 license plate reads LASRMAN. "The injector area is one of the critical areas" of the whole project.

The free-electron laser is one of the Navy's highest-priority weapons programs, and it's not hard to see why. "We're fast approaching the limits of our ability to hit manoeuvring pieces of metal in the sky with other maneuvering pieces of metal," says Rear Adm. Nevin Carr, the Navy's chief of research. The next level: "fighting at the speed of light and hypersonics" -- that is, the free-electron laser and the Navy's Mach-8 electromagnetic rail gun.

Say goodbye to an adversary's anti-ship missiles, and prepare to fire bullets from 200 miles away, far from shoreline defences. No wonder the Navy asked Congress to double its budget for directed-energy weapons this week to $60 million, most of which will go to the free-electron laser.

It won't be until the 2020s, Carr estimates, that a free-electron laser will be mounted on a ship. (Same goes for the rail gun.) Right now, the free-electron laser produces a 14-kilowatt beam. It needs to get to 100 kilowatts to be viable to defend a ship, the Navy thinks. But what happened at Jefferson Labs Friday shrinks the time necessary to get to 100 kilowatts and expands the lethality of the laser. Here's why.

All lasers start off as atoms that get agitated into becoming photons, light that's focused through some kind of medium, like chemicals or crystals, into a beam operating on a particular wavelength. But the free-electron laser is unique: It doesn't use a medium, just supercharged electrons run through a racetrack of superconductors and magnets -- an accelerator, to be technical -- until it produces a beam that can operate on multiple wavelengths.

That means the beam from the free-electron laser won't lose potency as it runs through all the crud in ocean air, because its operators will be able to adjust its wavelengths to compensate. And if you want to make it more powerful, all you need to do is add electrons.

But to add electrons, you need to inject pressure into your power source, so the electrons shake out and run through the racetrack. That's done through a gun called an injector. In the basement of a building in Jefferson Labs, a 240-foot racetrack uses a 300-kilovolt injector to pressurize the electrons out of 200 kilowatts of power and send them shooting through the accelerator.

Currently, the free-electron laser project produces the most-powerful beam in the world, able to cut through 20 feet of steel per second. If it gets up to its ultimate goal, of generating a megawatt's worth of laser power, it'll be able to burn through 2,000 feet of steel per second. Just add electrons. [More]

Pilots will not release their grip on the stick easily. The Navy is top-heavy with ex-pilots at the flag rank, and their community is pretty solid. And this labor demand problem is even more troublesome to the USAF. But sooner or later the lack of rides and the problem of defense budgets will make them quaint reminders of how Grandpa used to fight wars.

Like cavalry.

(I hate horses, too)