Quote of the Day

"This is America, where a white Catholic male Republican judge was murdered on his way to greet a Democratic Jewish woman member of Congress, who was his friend. Her life was saved initially by a 20-year-old Mexican-American gay college student, and eventually by a Korean-American combat surgeon, all eulogized by our African-American president."

- Only in America, Mark Shields on Tucson Shootings

King of the Hill Rule

"Special rules are highly flexible tools for tailoring floor action to individual bills. Amendments may be limited or prohibited. The order of voting on amendments may be structured. For example, the House frequently adopts a special rule called a king-of-the-hill rule. First used in 1982, a king-of-the-hill rule provides for a sequence of votes on alternative amendments, usually full substitutes for the bill. The last amendment to receive a majority wins, even if it receives fewer votes than some other amendment. This rule allows members to vote for more than one version of the legislation, which gives them freedom both to support a version that is easy to defend at home and to vote for the version preferred by their party’s leaders. Even more important, the procedure advantages the version voted on last, which is usually the proposal favored by the majority party leadership. That is, if four measures were allowed to be voted on and, say, the second one passed by a vote of 435-0, but the fourth one passed by a vote of 218-217, it would be the fourth measure that would be sent to the Senate, despite the fact that a competing measure clearly had drawn more support."

- More here of that special rule which is now history

An Economic "Giant" and Hunger - India

"A persistent fact: India, despite its ambitions as an emerging economic giant, still struggles to feed its 1.1 billion people.

Four decades after the Green Revolution seemed to be solving India’s food problems, nearly half of Indian children age 5 or younger are malnourished. And soaring food prices, a problem around the world, are especially acute in India.While India’s agricultural problems are part of this bigger global puzzle, in many ways India’s food challenges are more entrenched and systemic than those faced elsewhere.
Western investors may take eager note of India’s economic growth rate of nearly 9 percent a year. But that statistic rings hollow in India’s vast rural areas. Agriculture employs more than half the population, but it accounts for only 15 percent of the economy — and it has grown an average of only about 3 percent in recent years.

Critics say Indian policy makers have failed to follow up on the country’s investments in agricultural technology of the 1960s and ’70s, as they focused on more glamorous, urban industries like information technology, financial services and construction.
There is no agribusiness of the type known in the United States, with highly mechanized farms growing thousands of acres of food crops, because Indian laws and customs bar corporations from farming land directly for food crops. The laws also make it difficult to assemble large land holdings.

Yet even as India’s farming still depends on manual labor and the age-old vicissitudes of nature, demand for food has continued to rise — because of a growing population and rising incomes, especially in the middle and upper classes. As a result, India is importing ever greater amounts of some staples like beans and lentils (up 157 percent from 2004 to 2009) and cooking oil (up 68 percent in the same period).Experts say India needs to make changes like some of the ones China made, beginning in the late 1970s, when it started investing heavily in agriculture and eased regulations on farming."
As recently as 1977, Chinese and Indian farmers harvested roughly the same amount of wheat for each acre that they planted. But by 2009, United Nations data shows that wheat yields were 1.7 times higher in China than in India."

-via MR

The National Parks Project Trailer

"In 1911, Parks Canada was founded, becoming the world’s first national parks service. On the eve of its centennial, FilmCAN and Primitive Entertainment, in conjunction with Parks Canada and Discover World HD are pleased to present The National Parks Project (NPP), a ground-breaking collaborative film, music, television and new media project that features contributions by more than 50 of Canada’s most acclaimed filmmakers and musicians, celebrating the inspirational beauty of Canada’s national parks.
The National Parks Project features a total of 52 artists from across Canada, showcasing a cross-section of the country’s best music and filmmaking talent in an unprecedented collaborative framework. Our goal in curating the project has been to illustrate the diversity of the arts community as a kind of cultural mirror of the diversity of the Canadian landscape. The project has facilitated collaborations that would likely never have taken place otherwise — for example, a former member of major American rock band Smashing Pumpkins working with a member of the Montreal avant garde improvisational community. In creating these kinds of links between disparate creative communities, we also hope to embody the diversity of Canadian society as a whole."
-More Here



National Parks Project - Trailer from Ryan J. Noth on Vimeo.

Quote of the Day

"I pray we win the Cup for Tendulkar"

- Here and me too

"Recession" - On Thursday 18th September At 11am...

"On thursday 18th September at 11 am the Federal Reserve noticed a tremendous draw-down of money market accounts in the US; (money) to the tune of $550 billion was being drawn out in the matter of an hour or two. The Treasury opened up its window to help and pumped $105 billion in the system and quickly realized that they could not stem the tide. We were having an electronic run on the banks. They decided to close the operation, close down the money accounts and announce a guarantee of $250,000 per account so there wouldn't be further panic out there.

If they had not done, their estimation is that by 2pm that afternoon $5.5 trillion would have been drawn out of the money-market system of the US; (this) would have collapsed the entire economy of the US and within 24 hours the world economy would have collapsed. It would have ben the end of our economic system and our political system as we know it."

-Paul Kanjorski

Ecolacy - And Then What?

"One of our favorite authors is the ecologist/economist Garrett Hardin, author of works such as Living Within Limits and Filters Against Folly, as well as the famous essay on the “Tragedy of the Commons.” In Filters Against Folly, Hardin outlines his approach to rational thinking through three major filters: literacy, numeracy, and “ecolacy.”

Literacy is easy to define: What do the words mean? Language, as Hardin points out, can be used to inhibit or enhance clear thinking. (Think about how politicians use certain words and phrases to frame issues.)

Numeracy is straight-forward as well: What are the quantities involved? As Hardin saw it, the failure to invoke quantities is a major weak-point in critical analysis. Any competent analyst (not just in business, but in all human endeavor) must be in tune with quantities, numbers, and scale. As for his “ecolate” filter, Hardin focuses on the first law of ecology: You can never merely do one thing. Even the most numerate and literate analyses usually forget to ask the crucial question: “And then what?” It’s a messy question; asking it leads you to a lot of dead ends. But that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. The second order of effects can often dwarf the first."

- More on Garrett Harin's classic phrase "Ecolacy" @ FS

Nuclear Testing 1945 - 1998

Tyler Cowen On The Great Stagnation - EconTalk

"Let's talk about health. Medicare: what would you do practically? Depends on how practical I have to be. I think ideally Medicare should be for catastrophic expenses and not for the elderly, per se. I think the best health care system in the world is Singapore, where you have health savings accounts for smaller expenditures; single payer accounts for catastrophic; and a savings mandate integrated with the retirement system. Now, is that practical for this country at this point? No. We voted for something else; it's passed into law. So, in that sense, I'm not sure there is any practical solution. The current system is not sustainable, in any case, even pre-ACA. People say such and such is not viable politically; there are going to be a lot of things that are not viable politically that are not here now. They are going to have to be. Education? We live under Federalism. So, there is not a single stroke educationally that we can have or even should have. I think we are seeing a lot of green shoots, a lot of experimentation at the state and local levels. We are seeing better ideas spread. Charter schools are good. School choice. Mostly I think we need more experimentation, more interest in being able to fire bad teachers. The Obama Administration is very unpopular with Teachers' Unions. I take that to be a very good sign. Not sure they have succeeded that much yet. But the fact that a Democratic President would be willing to be extremely unpopular with teachers and teachers' unions I think shows the political equilibrium on that issue has shifted and we will see continued experimentation and improvement. Interesting to see whether that unpopularity persists in 2012. What about government itself? Some of these changes would naturally lead to smaller government. Piecemeal approach. I would decriminalize. Most are all drugs. I would cut defense spending. I would eliminate all foreign subsidies. Long list of ideas; I think none would come as a surprise to you. What would be the consequence? I think when you improve policy there is always going to be the question: Is this improvement a one-off change--which is fine, I'm all for a one-off change--or will it improve the long-term rate of growth? You'll find economists from all points of view pretend to know: this will be a one-off change or will improve growth. In most cases, we don't actually know. We should institute as many policy improvements as we can. We won't know in advance which ones will improve the growth rate and which ones will just give us one-off improvements; and do them all, and let it all kick in and see how good it's going to be. That's my basic attitude."

And going to the fundamental--maybe a natural argument at the heart of this book, which is that innovation is a trial and error process, not smooth; and we have this illusion of 3% a year, that that's the growth rate of the U.S. economy, and that's a bad bird's-eye view. And that's become a dangerous view. Why is it dangerous? For fiscal reasons. Our combination of spending and taxing decisions is leading us off the precipice. It was not as dangerous to have that illusion in 1985 as it is today. It's partly why the illusion has persisted. You could believe it at very low social cost, certainly no private cost. But I think we are finally reaching the time fiscally, some time in the next 20 years, well before then given bond markets, something will have to give. We'll need to reorganize. So are you an optimist, pessimist--where would you put yourself right now? Well, compared to whom is always the question. Some people are calling the book pessimistic, but I don't see it that way. Obviously it's pessimistic compared to someone who completely doesn't see any problem of the growth slowdown. But I think we'll get out of the growth slowdown. I think we're already doing a lot of things right, especially with the Internet. We are starting a bit with education. I'd like to see a bit higher status given to science and the science enterprise. But the Progressive story is in my view the pessimistic one. It's like: the rich have taken over the government and we need to seize it back and institute 90% marginal tax rates and 50% unionized economy to get it all back. And that, in my view, is never going to happen, not even possible it's going to happen. Those people ought to be pessimistic. My view is that the economy is deeply uneven. We're in a slow patch. It will come back; I don't pretend to know when. I see a lot of positive developments. I think the time between productivity bursts is smaller than it used to be. In large part because of science and capitalism in the modern world, and decentralization of governance and the Internet. That makes me pretty optimistic."

- More Here

Quote of the Day

"I now say that the world has the technology – either available or well advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called “organic” methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot."

-Norman Borlaug