CRP

In today’s environment of cutting spending on Federal programs, tough decisions are being made. Here’s a program that most of you in urban areas have not even heard of, but it’s a big issue for farmers and it affects all of us.

An article in the Star Tribune discusses the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP). This program pays farmers to keep marginal land out of cultivation. The benefit to the rest of us:

Keeping those acres out of production has reaped enormous environmental benefits. CRP has increased the number of ducks in the Prairie Pothole Region of Minnesota and the Dakotas by 2 million a year, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Nationally, between 2004 and 2007, CRP lands retained 1.86 billion pounds of nitrogen, 420 million pounds of phosphorus and 1.8 billion tons of soil -- much of which would have found its way into the Mississippi River and the so-called dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. It also reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 200 million tons. And that was just four years.

But the program is under fire from two fronts. First, with today’s grain prices, CRP payments don’t compete with what the farmer could earn by cultivating the land. Second, the program will likely be a victim of cost cutting during the budget negotiations.

How much is it worth to improve air and water quality? Is it more important than other potential cost-cutting targets? Just one more thing to consider.

License plate readers: boon, bane, or both?

Here’s another technology with a huge potential for good and a disturbing probability of abuse.

A recent story in the Washington Post describes how license plate readers are being used in law enforcement. These devices simply capture your license number as you drive by. I took advantage of the technology myself recently when I used a tollway and a bill magically appeared a couple of weeks later even though I never stopped. The issue isn’t that the technology can do good.

The technology first came to the Washington region in 2004 as a pilot program. During an early test, members of the Washington Area Vehicle Enforcement Unit recovered eight cars, found 12 stolen license plates and made three arrests in a single shift.

Having the technology during the Washington area sniper shootings in 2002 might have stopped the attacks sooner, detectives said, because police could have checked whether any particular car was showing up at each of the shooting sites.

The issue is lack of any control. There are no rules and no consistency on how long the data is stored, how it’s aggregated, who has access, and what it can be used for.

The DC area is apparently ahead of the rest of the country in implementation, with 27 million reads a year for the Maryland State Police alone. Doubtless as word spreads other geographic areas will jump on the bandwagon. There are no easy answers here, but right now this data is not controlled by any consistent oversight. At least the debate needs to take place.

Three Pinocchios for recent campaign ads

This Washington Post Fact Checker article is one of their better efforts. It shows a transcript of the interviews from which the excerpts in the advertisements in question are taken, with the portion that actually appears in the ad in bold. It’s a great illustration of how you can twist someone’s words by creative snipping of what they say.

It saddens me that our political process has sunk this low. I used to refuse to vote for any candidate who preferred to smear their opponent rather than running on their own merits, but recently it has become obvious that this principle would leave me no one to vote for. The real pity is that the vast majority of American voters will use campaign ads like this to make up their mind. “Don’t confuse me with facts.”

Tradeoff

We all know that every decision is a tradeoff.

We want our government to be efficient and purchase from the lowest bidder but to be sensitive to veterans and other individuals who deserve a break. A recent Washington Post story examines the issue of how the Veterans Affairs Department should resolve this conflict. One law mandates that they buy from the lowest bidder; Veterans First mandates that they steer work to veteran-owned suppliers.

Two goals that are noble and mutually exclusive.

I don't really have anything to rant about

I am turning into an angry old man. There are those of you who would comment that that’s no transition – that it happened decades ago. So take this tail of woe with the appropriate grain of salt. In the great scheme of things, I don’t have even the most tiny problem. But it will feel good to tell it.

We had high winds over the weekend. The good and bad news is that it stripped most of the leaves off the trees. Good because now I don’t have to wait any longer to do my raking . . . bad because the work I’ve done so far was basically undone by leaves blowing into any nook or cranny big enough to shelter a leaf. So this morning I decided to rake leaves, especially since the weather is supposed to turn cold and wet tomorrow. (We have had a glorious autumn . . . warm and dry . . . so I can’t complain if the weather turns seasonal.)

“Raking leaves” for me consists of cranking up the mower and blowing the leaves into strips, then raking those and carting them away in the lawn trailer. This I did. And did. In fact, I misjudged the time and came in later than I meant to; I had a 1 PM appointment to give blood. But it all worked out fine . . . I took a quick shower, bolted down a quick lunch, and got to my 1 PM appointment a few minutes early.

Except that there were about 30 people in front of me. It seems that there was a bit of a misunderstanding in terms of appointments. You could call to set one up, or you could do it on the web site. But the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing. I think there were 40 people signed up for 1 PM appointments.

I got into the screening session, and the screener didn’t have a thermometer. Then she didn’t have a stethoscope to take my blood pressure. Then I had to explain the geographic deferral rules to her. “No, you aren’t deferred if you’ve been to Turkey; it’s on the other list where you have to be there five years to merit a deferral.”

The good news – as it turns out, the only good news for the visit – was that my hemoglobin was high enough to qualify me to donate double red. So I go to the machine, and the phlebotomist proceeds to complain at length about recent procedure changes and how bad they are. Complain if you want, but not to the person who’s there to give blood!

Then the comment that should have tipped me off: “I don’t see the vein but it must be there somewhere.” Stick. Blood flows for about two minutes, and stops.

I have been donating blood for more than 40 years and this has never happened to me. Maybe I’ve been lucky. But I don’t believe that. Ms “I don’t see the vein” managed to make me waste a couple of hours and endure the discomfort, and for it there is nothing to show.

So this evening I rewarded myself by having a pint of the beer that we missed on Friday night. Made me feel better . . . and writing this blog entry is having the same effect.

Tomorrow will be a better day.

Our government? Something right?

It’s refreshing to see our government do something right for a change. Several government agencies shared in the National Cybersecurity Innovation Award for installing secure configurations on PCs from the beginning and reducing the time to deploy critical patches from 57 days to just 72 hours. Full details here.

And a special award to PR Newswire for the most ridiculous URL seen this week, hidden in the link above:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/us-central-command-j-6-us-air-force-us-army-and-department-of-defense-chief-information-officers-and-their-teams-and-the-department-of-defense-joint-consensus-working-group-win-national-cybersecurity-innovation-award-132943903.html