Easter Weekend Links

Here are a few stories to read over your Easter weekend, or if you are lucky enough, spring break:

You won't believe how Nike lost Steph to Under Armour - ESPN

Louisville Is A Grumpy Host as It's Team Sits One Out - New York Times

Low-Budget Leicester's Title Run Nets Fortune for Thai Owner - Bloomberg

With Bees In Trouble, Almond Farmers Try Trees That Don't Need 'Em - The Salt

Ag groups pick up tab for water quality lawsuit defense - Des Moines Register. Farmers have been working hard to make sure we have to be regulated.  I just went to my fertilizer certification class which was required because of the Grand Lake St. Mary's and Lake Erie blue-green algae disasters.  This Iowa case is directly connected to those.

Ash dieback and beetle attach likely to 'wipe out' ash trees in UK, Europe - the Guardian.  Sadly, they are almost gone locally.

The Food Industrial Complex - Priceonomics

My Favorite Part of Easter? Satan and the Harrowing of Hell - Pacific Standard.  I remember reading a book in my Intro to Theology class which delved into this little branch of Christian thought.  It sought to explain the most inexplicable part of the Christian salvation story, why did Jesus have to come to Earth and die for our sins?

The World's Most Urgent Science Project - The Atlantic

The Secrets of the Wave Pilots - New York Times Magazine

What Engineers Can Learn From the Design of the Penis - The Atlantic

Out Here, No One Can Hear You Scream - Huffington Post

Where Did ISIS Come From?  The Story Starts Here - Boston Globe

Forget Trump: Here's Who's Really Destroying the Republican Party - Fiscal Times.  Jim Jordan and the other Freedom Caucus nuts.  As the article mentions, my future congressman is going to join these clowns.

A Most Hated Man - The New Republic.  I don't really want to hate Ted Cruz as much as I do, but I think that as the much smarter champion of the Freedom Caucus, he is extremely dangerous.

A Bright Spot for Ted Cruz: State Capitals - Wall Street Journal.  See above two articles.  Most state legislatures are run by loons just like Jim Jordan.  For more evidence of this, look at the North Carolina transgender bathroom freakout this week.

Why Voters Will Stay Angry - Bloomberg

Here's the Stunning Amount of Money Top Wall Street C.E.O.s Made in 2015 - Vanity Fair

Sustainability: Transfer cannot meet China's needs - Nature

 

The Massive Scale of U.S. Defense Spending

From the Visual Capitalist, via Ritholtz:

Do we get our money's worth?  Asked another way, what is our post-World War II winning percentage?  However, I'm not totally stupid.  I'm invested in most major defense contractor stocks.

Republican Profiles in Courage

I've seen more courageous cowards, less bigoted Klansmen and more self-aware sociopaths.

Mid-October Weekend Links

Links were once again delayed by harvest.  We're looking to finish up in three or four days, which would be a modern record for our earliest harvest completion.  Here are a few stories for your reading pleasure:

Born That Way: The Legend of Coach Marvin Jarman - SBNation
'
The Grass Gambit: Remember When Notre Dame Tried to Slow Reggie Bush 10 Years Ago by Not Mowing the Lawn - Grantland, and Relive the famed 'Bush Push' game with the USC and Notre Dame players on the field - LA Times  The best part of the Grantland story:

Less than a week after the loss, Notre Dame inked Weis to a massive (and retrospectively hilarious) contract extension. And although Weis was relieved of his duties in 2009, he’s still receiving laughably exorbitant sums of money from the university.

Daily Fantasy: You're Screwed, Because You're Supposed to Be - Rolling Stone.  Umm...yeah.  Keno for sports fans.

US land prices fall, again. Ag machinery sales hit new low - Agrimoney.  It will get worse before it gets better.

U.S. Readies for a Return of Bird Flu - Wall Street Journal

Showdown at Waggoner Ranch - Texas Monthly
  
I Would Rather Be Herod's Pig: The History of a Taboo - Longreads

Devastating Chart Shows Why El Nino Won't Fix the Drought - Wired 
  
3CDC in Over-the-Rhine: Between Two Worlds - Cincinnati Magazine.  On the balancing act amongst poverty, crime, gentrification and respecting both long-time residents and newcomers. And Big Money.  Rule of Thumb: Bet on Big Money.

Bill Gates: 'We Need an Energy Miracle' - The Atlantic

The Very Great Alexander Von Humboldt - The New York Review of Books

How on Earth Could Trucks Move this 1,000 Ton Load? - Wired 

Spotlight shines, stage right, on U.S. House Freedom Caucus - Reuters.  Jim Jordan may be one of the main cogs in the freedumb caucus, but I don't think he's rich (his main assets are his government pensions).  He's just happy to do everything he can to help out the rich at the expense of the poor and the middle class.

The Pentagon's 'Concurrency Myth' Is Now Available In Supercarrier Size - Foxtrot Alpha

The Drone Papers - The Intercept.  A massive series on the very worst of the Obama presidency, and the American murder/assassination complex.

The Prop Plane Better Than The F-35

At least for close air support, the A-29 would be vastly more useful:

Political infighting like this led to poor air support in Afghanistan. And by 2006, a group of SEALs in Afghanistan were fed up with it. They asked the Secretary of the Navy personally for his help in getting a better plane overhead.
Not long after the SEALs’ request, the Secretary put together a small team and charged them with finding a better aircraft for this kind of war. Consensus quickly grew around a lightweight turboprop-driven plane. The team took possession of a couple old Vietnam-era OV-10 Broncos that last saw combat in Desert Storm, and started flying them. But they wanted something with more punch. More lethality. They soon found a plane built for exactly this purpose.
The classified Imminent Fury project was born.
In response to the SEALs’ request, the Navy committed Pentagon heresy by going backwards in airplane technology. Instead of jet engines, they found a propellor-driven plane worked better.
Years before, a Brazilian company called Embraer had built a plane specially made for the close-in aerial fighting that the dirty wars South American and African insurgencies required. The Navy immediately leased one of them for testing. (A later phase would have raised the number to four.) This is how Embraer’s EMB-314 Tucano became reborn as the A-29B Super Tucano.
The plane was refitted at the Navy’s test facility in Patuxent River, Maryland, and flown to an out-of-the-way airbase in Nevada so it could be seen how well this “Super T” could fight...
In Nevada, they shot 50-caliber machine guns mounted in the A-29’s wings. They dropped small laser-guided and GPS-guided bombs. They fired thousands of 2.75-inch rockets, some of which had laser-guidance upgrades. These were the types of weapons best suited to the war in Afghanistan. And for self-defense, the A-29 could even fire the same Sidewinder air-to-air missile used in their previous lives as jet pilots.
Multiple Imminent Fury test pilots, including Lt. Col. Mann, tell me that the plane was perfect for fighting guerrillas in Afghanistan. The commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, wanted four of them flying in his skies immediately. But would the Pentagon really fight for this plane? Especially one that, technologically, ran in the complete opposite direction of its stealthy F-35? 

The F-35 is a massive, perfectly politically designed boondoggle which is going to waste taxpayer dollars for a generation.  Meanwhile, ground troops will suffer in whichever ill-conceived wars our idiot politicians send them into.  That is how empires collapse.

NFL Opening Weekend Links

Football season is fully upon us, with harvest just around the corner.  Here are some stories for you to enjoy this weekend:

The Pitch - Grantland.  A remembrance of September 11 through baseball, and a reminder that the Bush presidency was a long series of major disasters. Also, Why Is ESPN Doing George W. Bush's Dirty Work For Him? - Deadspin.

The Never-ending Stadium Boondoggle - CityLab

Notre Dame President Stands Firm Amid Shifts in College Athletics - New York Times

Football Team Passes For 782 Yards, Scores 90 Points, Still Loses - Deadspin.  WTF?

Rediscovering the Pawpaw - Cincinnati Magazine.  I have some pawpaw trees on the farm, but can't say that there was enough meat to the fruit for me to really taste anything.  It was mainly packed with giant seeds.

Oh. Nuts! Why California's Pistachio Trees Are Shooting Blanks - The Salt

Cereals, Appropriability, and Hierarchy - Naked Capitalism.  Very interesting piece.  Is farmers' eternal hatred of the government and taxes rooted in the formation of society?

America's Most Unlikely Energy Project Is Rising From a Louisiana Bayou - Bloomberg

Understanding of complex networks could help unify gravity and quantum mechanics - ScienceDaily.  Way over my head, but sounds to me like mapping how a human-made or natural complex system is connected seems to match up with quantum theory.

Hellburners Were the Renaissance's Tactical Nukes - War Is Boring.  Speaking of tactical nukes...

A Prescription for More Black Doctors - The New York Times Magazine

Whatsoever Things Are True - The Atavist Magazine

The Continuing Cost of Catholicism's Sex Abuse Scandals - Pacific Standard

Chosen by Mississippi Democrats, Shy Trucker is at a Crossroads - New York Times.  Highlights the perilous state of the Democratic party in much of the interior United States, which also highlights the perilous state of democracy.

Jeb Bush and the Return of Voodoo Economics - The New Yorker  

The Case Against Stephen Harper - The Atlantic.  From what I hear the author say, it sounds like he is the first GOP prime minister of Canada.

Dairy Farmers at the Barricades  and Food Prices Drop Most in Seven Years on Grain Glut, China Rout - Bloomberg.  Seven years of plenty followed by....at least in farm household incomes.

 

Libertarian Paradise

Katrina.

Kasich Ridiculously Suggests U.S. Navy Is Too Small

Columbus Dispatch:

As he prepares to announce his quest for the Republican presidential nomination on Tuesday, Gov. John Kasich is poised to call for a major increase in the size of the U.S. Navy, saying that the American fleet has “really eroded.”
Although Kasich has not said how many ships he wants to add, he has made clear his belief that the current Navy of 272 ships is not large enough to deter China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea, attack Islamic State militants in Iraq and maintain a strong presence in the Atlantic Ocean.

That's John Kasich's big foreign policy position?  Consider how much bigger our navy is than any other in the world:

The U.S. Navy has 288 battle force ships, of which typically a third are underway at any given time. The U.S. Navy has 10 aircraft carriers, nine amphibious assault ships, 22 cruisers, 62 destroyers, 17 frigates and 72 submarines. In addition to ships, the U.S. Navy has 3,700 aircraft, making it the second largest air force in the world. At 323,000 active and 109,000 personnel, it is also the largest navy in terms of manpower.
What makes the U.S. Navy stand out the most is its 10 aircraft carriers—more than the rest of the world put together. Not only are there more of them, they’re also much bigger: a single Nimitz-class aircraft carrier can carry twice as many planes (72) as the next largest foreign carrier. Unlike the air wings of other countries, which typically concentrate on fighters, a typical U.S. carrier air wing is a balanced package capable of air superiority, strike, reconnaissance, anti-submarine warfare and humanitarian assistance/disaster relief missions.

Compare that to China, the world's second largest navy:

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) has come a long way in the last 25 years. The spectacular growth of the Chinese economy, which fueled a tenfold defense-budget increase since 1989, has funded a modern navy. From a green-water navy consisting of obsolete destroyers and fast attack boats, the PLAN has grown into a true blue-water fleet.
The PLAN currently has one aircraft carrier, three amphibious transports, 25 destroyers, 42 frigates, eight nuclear attack submarines and approximately 50 conventional attack submarines. The PLAN is manned by 133,000 personnel, including the Chinese Marine Corps, which consists of two brigades of 6,000 marines each.
The People’s Liberation Army Navy Air Force provides fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters for China’s new aircraft carrier, helicopters for surface ships, and shore-based fighter, attack and patrol aircraft. The PLANAF has 650 aircraft, including J-15 carrier-based fighters, J-10 multirole fighters, Y-8 maritime patrol aircraft, and Z-9 antisubmarine warfare aircraft.

Or take a look at this graphic:

 Oh shit, Italy has 2 aircraft carriers!  Hey, let's take a look at the ISIS navy:

No, seriously, I remember the USS Cole attack.  However, ISIS is in possession of a bunch of useless desert, and has nothing more than a couple Zodiac boats that could pass for a navy (which unfortunately can blow a bigass hole in a U.S. warship).  The fact is, the U.S. Navy is a ridiculously oversized force which is possibly vulnerable to missile attack and hasn't fought a real naval battle in almost 50 years.  There is possibly no less useful defense expenditure than building a larger navy just because we used to have more ships than we do now.  It seems like John Kasich looked around and said, "what ridiculous and wasteful defense program haven't the other dumbfuck Republican candidates put forward?  Oh, a bigger navy, that's what I'll go with."  He's proud he limited the billions of dollars we flushed down the toilet on the B-2 bomber (which my grandpa helped design), but he's come up with an equally wasteful project to champion in his tilt at the Republican nomination windmill.  God help us, Republicans are useless idiots.

Stay Classy, Cardinals

If anybody else is vying for the title of New England Patriots of Major League Baseball, they are going to have to get creative, because the Cardinals would seem to have a commanding lead (even bigger than their divisional lead):

The St. Louis Cardinals are being investigated by the FBI for allegedly hacking into networks and trying to steal information about the Houston Astros, The New York Times reported Tuesday.
Major League Baseball, the Cardinals and Astros all issued statements Tuesday saying they have cooperated fully with the investigation, which started last year after some information was posted anonymously online.
According to ESPN legal analyst Roger Cossack, the federal investigation is close to a conclusion.
The Times reported Tuesday that the FBI and Justice Department officials have evidence that Cardinals officials -- who were not identified -- allegedly tapped into the Astros' database and had access to statistics, scouting reports and internal discussions about players, trades and other proprietary information.
"Major League Baseball has been aware of and has fully cooperated with the federal investigation into the illegal breach of the Astros' baseball operations database," the MLB statement said. "Once the investigative process has been completed by federal law enforcement officials, we will evaluate the next steps and will make decisions promptly."
The Astros and Cardinals added that they would not comment further, as it's an ongoing federal investigation.
Late Tuesday, the FBI office in Houston released a statement that neither confirmed nor denied the investigation, but added, "The FBI aggressively investigates all potential threats to public and private sector systems.
"Once our investigations are complete, we pursue all appropriate avenues to hold accountable those who pose a threat in cyberspace."...
In June 2014, the Astros claimed to have been victims of hackers who accessed their servers and published months of internal trade talks on the Internet. It was then that the team began working with the FBI and Major League Baseball security in an effort to identify who was responsible for the breach.
According to the Times, the FBI believes that Cardinals officials gained access to the Astros' database by using a list of passwords associated with Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow dating to his tenure with the Cardinals from 2003 until he left for Houston after the 2011 season.

What's a better comparison for the Cardinals, Richard Nixon or Kim Jung Un?  I'd go with Dick Nixon (or Bill Belicheck).  I mean, the Cardinals spying on last year's Astros is much like Nixon worrying about the McGovern campaign.  The bright side is, it gives the rest of America another reason to hate the Cardinals.  As if we needed more.

Update:

Flag Day Weekend Links

Well, it's hot and the forecast looks bad for finishing first-cutting hay.  Here are some interesting stories to check out:

Notre Dame's coach said something jarring (and refreshing) about player academics - SBNation.  Honesty is the best policy.

Make Way for Rose Lavelle - Cincinnati Magazine.  I'm not exactly a soccer fan, but this is pretty engagingly written.

Where Have You Gone, Secretariat? - FiveThirtyEight

The secret life and death of a hockey analytics pioneer - ESPN

Brownsville's Unlikely Rugby Dynasty - New York Times

Requiem for The Dream: Dusty Rhodes, 1945-2015 - Grantland

We'll All Eat Less Meat Soon-Like it or Not - Mother Jones.  :(

America's Big Food Waste Problem - Pacific Standard.  America's Big [fill in the blank] Waste Problem seems workable to me.

Mighty Farming Microbes:Companies Harness Bacteria To Give Crops A Boost - The Salt

SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of  Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines - New York Times

What is Code? - Bloomberg BusinessWeek.  38,000 words and 76 pages.  Wow.

What It's Like To Be Declared Dead by the Government - priceonomics

You're About to See an Incredibly Rare Cloud, and It's Proof the Climate Is Changing - Bloomberg

NBA Finals: All The Champions Since 1947 -  Dadaviz

Memorial Day Weekend Links

With most Americans enjoying a three-day weekend, here are some interesting stories to check out:

The Night the Ali-Liston Fight Came to Lewiston - New York Times.  It amazes me that a heavyweight title fight ended up being staged at an arena built by a Catholic parish to host high school hockey.

Unclimbable - SBNation

Doc: Justice for Oscar Robertson, 60 Years Removed - Cincinnati Enquirer.  Just a small reminder what life was like back in the Fifties.

My Letterman Years - Grantland

What do we need to fight climate change? More worms. - Grist

The Kinetic Wood Sculptor - priceonomics

Will Art Save Our Descendents from Radioactive Waste? - JSTOR Daily

In the Beginning - Aeon

American Innovation Lies on Weak Foundation - New York Times

America's Virulent, Extremist Counterterrorism Ideology - Foreign Policy

Why Children Are Abandoning Baseball - Wall Street Journal.  Not just baseball (although most dramatically), but all organized sports.  Just a guess: adults taking the fun out of it.

Mother's Day Weekend Links

I suppose my mother would consider it a Mother's Day gift if I wasn't posting "another one of your rants,"* but after disappointing her this much, why change now.  Here are some interesting stories for you to check out this weekend:

* her quote when she saw me working on posting last weekend's links

Yankee, Executive, Soldier, Spy - Grantland

The Poison Oasis - SBNation

Livestock Farming Is Changing Agriculture on Long Island - New York Times.  

Never Mind Oil, Iran's About to Shake the World Pistachio Market - Bloomberg

The Texas Deep Frying Champion - priceonomics

Americans Are Drinking Less But Spending More on Fancy Booze - Bloomberg.  Also, see One Bottle To Rule Them All - Cincinnati Magazine

House OKs Expanded Sales of Raw Milk - Texas Tribune.  Where did I see somebody say that the proponents of raw milk were the food equivalent of anti-vaxxers?   Wherever it was, it was true.

Your Winter Vegetables: Brought to You by California's Very Last Drops of Water - Mother Jones.
 It's interesting how senior water rights work.

Getting a Clue About the Avian Flu - Pacific Standard

Monsanto Make Bid to Go Big in Pesticides - Wall Street Journal

 Overkill - The New Yorker.  Atul Gawande on unnecessary medical care.

The Computers Are Listening - The Intercept

Girl Strikers - Belt Magazine

Alberta Loses Its Goddamn Mind for the Fourth Time: A Guide for the Perplexed - Vice.  Very interesting history: "Before long, rural farmers got tired of being fucked over by Central Canada and their nonsense party system. So in 1921, they handed a massive majority to the United Farmers of Alberta, a co-operative group that had decided to turn itself into a political party to set up a government by farmers, for farmers. This kept the trains running on time until premier John Brownlee resigned in disgrace after a bizarre sex scandal in 1934.

In UK Election, Ancient Kingdom Eyes Political Comeback - Wall Street Journal. More history.

The UK General Election Result Will Probably End Up Changing Britain Forever - Vice.  It is interesting that Scotland is a recipient state and also anti-austerity while England is a donor and pro-austerity, while in the U.S. the recipients seem to be pro-austerity and the donors are anit-austerity.  See also, The Anti-austerity economics of the SNP - Pieria

Huckabee's Hucksterism vs. Clintons' Cash - National Journal.  The grifters of Hope, Arkansas.  Some might say Obama is the ultimate grifter of hope.  I'd disagree.

Surveillance planes spotted in the sky for days after West Baltimore riots - Washington Post

Baltimore: Secure but Skeptical

The Extreme Effectiveness of ISIS Terrorist Tactics

I've heard a lot of people in the last few days say that we need to double down on killing those fuckers from ISIS because they behead people and set some dude on fire.  Yes, both of those things are horrible, but doesn't Saudi Arabia behead people they find guilty of crimes?  And what the fuck were those dirty fucking hippies doing protesting against Dow back in the 1960s?  Wasn't it for manufacturing the napalm that was dropped over rural villages and set innocent civilians on fire?  Does anybody remember seeing this picture?

And it seems like I recently saw a post about the photo from the first Gulf war that no U.S. newspaper would publish. It showed one of thousands of Iraqi army victims of a U.S. fuel-air bomb attack:

This is a description of that scene:

The retreating Iraqi soldiers had been trapped. They were frozen in a traffic jam, blocked off by the Americans, by Mutla Ridge, by a minefield. Some fled on foot; the rest were strafed by American planes that swooped overhead, passing again and again to destroy all the vehicles. Milk vans, fire trucks, limousines, and one bulldozer appeared in the wreckage alongside armored cars and trucks, and T-55 and T-72 tanks. Most vehicles held fully loaded, but rusting, Kalashnikov variants. According to descriptions from reporters like The New York Times’ R.W. Apple and the Observer’s Colin Smith, amid the plastic mines, grenades, ammunition, and gas masks, a quadruple-barreled anti-aircraft gun stood crewless and still pointing skyward. Personal items, like a photograph of a child’s birthday party and broken crayons, littered the ground beside weapons and body parts. The body count never seems to have been determined, although the BBC puts it in the “thousands.....”
“There were 1,400 [Iraqi soldiers] in that convoy, and every picture transmitted until that one came, two days after the event, was of debris, bits of equipment,” Tony McGrath, the Observer’s pictures editor, was quoted as saying in the same article. “No human involvement in it at all; it could have been a scrapyard. That was some dreadful censorship.”

Here is a description of how those bombs work:

A Human Rights Watch report of 1 February 2000 quotes a study made by the US Defense Intelligence Agency:

The [blast] kill mechanism against living targets is unique–and unpleasant.... What kills is the pressure wave, and more importantly, the subsequent rarefaction [vacuum], which ruptures the lungs.... If the fuel deflagrates but does not detonate, victims will be severely burned and will probably also inhale the burning fuel. Since the most common FAE fuels, ethylene oxide and propylene oxide, are highly toxic, undetonated FAE should prove as lethal to personnel caught within the cloud as most chemical agents.

According to a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency study, "the effect of an FAE explosion within confined spaces is immense. Those near the ignition point are obliterated. Those at the fringe are likely to suffer many internal, and thus invisible injuries, including burst eardrums and crushed inner ear organs, severe concussions, ruptured lungs and internal organs, and possibly blindness." Another Defense Intelligence Agency document speculates that because the "shock and pressure waves cause minimal damage to brain tissue…it is possible that victims of FAEs are not rendered unconscious by the blast, but instead suffer for several seconds or minutes while they suffocate."

And then we have to remember firebombing Dresden and Tokyo, and both times that an atomic or nuclear weapon were ever used in war.  The horrific scenes in which ISIS beheads or immolates prisoners involves two or three bad guys killing one or two good guys.  How does that compare to a few good guys immolating thousands of bad guys?  What about three or four good guys torturing a bad guy to death?  I guess I have a hard time telling the good guys from the bad guys without any reference to skin color, religion or the efficiency of the attack.  Please don't tell me that we need to continue spending gargantuan amounts of money and wasting lives trying to "rid the world of evil."  If we do that, we will probably be killed along with those fuckers from ISIS.  God have mercy on us all.

Chart of the Day: The Cost of the "War on Terror"

From Mercatus Center, via Forbes:

A recent report from the Congressional Research Service, which examines the cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and other global “War on Terror” operations since 9/11, calculates a cumulative (fiscal year 2001 through fiscal year 2014) nominal price tag of $1.6 trillion. Adding the war funding for fiscal year 2015 that was passed in December pushes the total to almost $1.7 trillion. When it comes to funding national defense, policymakers tend to ignore war costs so an accurate assessment on the burden on taxpayer of overseas military ventures is increasingly important as pressure mounts to increase the Pentagon’s regular “base” budget.

As the following chart shows, the vast majority of the funding has been allocated to the Department of Defense ($1.562 trillion). The State Department and related foreign aid efforts received $101 billion and the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, $17 billion.

$1.681 trillion.  For what?  Now we've got people wetting their pants that we have to kill ISIS because they are evil.  Fuck that.  Some other evil bastards will come along when we kill a bunch of civilians in our war on ISIS. Let's just shut the hell up about the "war on terror" and leave folks in the rest of the world to deal with the fuckheads in their own neighborhoods.  We'll be fine.

Super Bowl Weekend Links

If you aren't too engrossed in pre-pregame festivities, here are some interesting stories to check out:

The Last Days of Football - n+1

Where Americans Play Football-And Where They Don't - Wall Street Journal.  With red state vs. blue state analysis.  It is striking how rural folks are least likely to tell their kids not to play football because of concussion risk.

How Goldman Banker Became NFL's Go-To-Stadium-Finance-Guy - Bloomberg.  Should have known those fuckers would be making stacks of cash in this taxpayer ripoff, too.

A Brand New Lie To Get the Bucks Their Stadium - Above the Law.  Goldman and Scott Walker.  Everybody notices $300 million in cuts to the UW system and $220 million for a new basketball arena.

In Corn Country We Have Two Choices.  Let's Pick the More Logical, Beautiful One - Big Picture Agriculture

Ingredion bets on flat 2015 corn prices - Agrimoney. 

How can farmers in central and eastern Europe close yield gap with west? - The Guardian

Could This Virus Be Good For You? - Morning Edition.  Welcome news in case of pandemic.  I wonder if this may have spared some of the survivors of the Spanish influenza.

Your Son Is Deceased - The New Yorker

Falling Prices Spread Pain Far Across The Oil Patch - Wall Street Journal

People or parchment? - Aeon

Life in the Sickest Town in America - The Atlantic

American corruption is exceptional, too - Reuters

Getting out of Afghanistan - Fast Company

Arthur Laffer's view on the Kansas economy: Prosperity awaits patient tax cutters - Kansas City Star.  Laffer is a jackass.

In a 45-minute phone interview, Laffer said while he is “not surprised,” he didn’t know why the deficits have occurred. He still believes adamantly in his supply-side economic theory: If you reduce income taxes, you will raise more revenue, not less.
Just when the revenue starts to rise is another matter.
“You have to view this over 10 years,” Laffer said. “It will work in Kansas.”

If you reduce income taxes, you will raise more revenue, not less.  Too bad that has never worked in reality. As far as Laffer and Republicans are concerned, tax cuts can never fail.  They can only be failed.

Scott Walker Isn't Sorry - The Atlantic.  That guy looks like such a used-car salesman to me.  If I looked up smarmy in the dictionary, I'm not sure if I'd find his picture or Ted Cruz's.  Both are going to annoy the piss out of me during the Republican primary.

How an Amish missionary caused 2014's massive measles outbreak - Vox

Americans' Overreaction to Islamic Terrorism

Defense One has a must-read piece on our over-sized reaction to the Islamic terrorist threat:

In fact, Muslims account for only a small percentage of the terrorism in Europe over the last several years. Most politically-motivated violence there is carried out by nationalist and sectarian groups, yet the government and the media don’t treat these threats the same. Anders Breivik killed 77 people in separate gun and bomb attacks in 2011, including many children. Many people in Europe share Breivik’s xenophobic, ultra-nationalist, anti-Muslim ideology, but we don’t hold them collectively responsible for his decision to employ violence to further those views. We don’t call for a war on his beliefs; we demand his criminal prosecution.
A similar phenomenon occurs here in the United States, where most media outlets covered the distant Paris attacks far more closely than domestic shooting sprees by white supremacist Fraizer Glenn Miller, or anti-government extremists like Curtis Wade Holley, Eric Frein, and Jerad Miller, who assassinated four police officers in separate instances last year.
The Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point documented 3,053 injuries and 670 fatalities in the United States from far right violence from 1990 to 2012. A 2014 University of Maryland survey indicates U.S. law enforcement now view Sovereign Citizens as the greatest terror threat they face. Yet the federal government effectively treats these acts of politically-motivated violence as hate crimes or lone attacks rather than terrorism. This may explain why an attempted firebombing at a Colorado NAACP office building the day before the Paris attacks received little media attention.....
Deaths attributable to terrorism here in the U.S. are a tiny fraction of the roughly 14,000 homicides committed each year, one-third of which go unsolved. Yet we devote far more resources to uncovering potential terrorists than to finding actual killers. The purpose of putting terrorist acts in context is to better understand how we might respond in a more effective manner.
The second prevalent theme in the early coverage of the Paris attacks was the tendency to exaggerate the capabilities of Muslim extremists. With very little information available — save a brief video showing the execution of a wounded police officer — many counterterrorism officials and policy makers didn’t hesitate to call it a “sophisticated” attack that represented a new and “more complex” threat. The FBI and DHS backed this description in a law enforcement bulletin, claiming the Paris attacks “demonstrated a greater degree of sophistication and advanced weapons handling than seen in previous coordinated small-arms attacks, such as the 2013 Westgate Mall attack” in Nairobi, Kenya. The Somali militant group al-Shabaab claimed credit for the armed assault on Westgate Mall, which killed sixty-seven people. Details regarding the attack and whether some perpetrators escaped are still mired in controversy.
The facts don’t support the hasty conclusion that the Paris attack was as sophisticated as originally claimed. While one or both of the Kouachi brothers may have travelled to Yemen and received some training from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, their attack on the Charlie Hebdo offices was almost derailed because they went to the wrong address. They had to ask a maintenance man for directions. They caught a lucky break by finding an employee outside the office who they forced to punch the code necessary to enter the building. After the shooting, they crashed their escape vehicle and left identification papers behind when they abandoned it.
Co-conspirator Amedy Coulibaly’s spree appeared even less organized, shooting a police officer, a street sweeper and a jogger before storming the kosher supermarket. The weapons Coulibaly and the Kouachi’s used weren’t financed or provided by organized terrorist groups, but purchased from a known criminal for less than 5,000 euros, which Coulibaly obtained through a fraudulent bank loan.
They did succeed at killing 17 people, which is tragic. But spree shooters here in the United States racked up similar death tolls, in some cases before graduating high school, or saddled with serious mental illnesses. It doesn’t take sophisticated training to pick up a gun and kill lots of unarmed people.

Yes. Yes.  A thousand times, yes.  We face dozens of more likely ways to die every day, but for some reason, people really freak out if Muslims kill some people, somewhere around the world, sometime.  I don't get it.  Well, I suspect that many Christians fear Muslim terrorism as part of some kind of Holy War, and Israelis have their own reasons for making a stink about the attacks, but I see absolutely no reason why anybody would think this minuscule threat to American lives is worth spending trillions of dollars, thousands of American lives, hundreds of thousands of non-American lives, and having a crazy police state apparatus record every phone call and email and web search around the world in order to "protect our freedoms."  Our freedoms (whatever those amount to in a surveillance state) are not under threat from those scary Muslims.  They are under threat from our government and our cowardly reaction to sporadic incidents of violence committed by Muslims.

First Weekend of 2015 Links

Well, it's a fresh, new year, but we seem to have the same stale politics.  Here are some stories for your enjoyment:

No More Bouts, but the Fight Goes On - Wall Street Journal

The Weirdness of the NHL's First Modern Outdoor Game - Deadspin.  An exhibition game in Vegas in September, 1991.

As Bourbon Booms, Demand For Barrels Is Overflowing - NPR

America's Top 100 Land Owners 2014 - Modern Farmer.  I missed making the list again this year.  Maybe 2015.

High-Tech Tools Help Irish Dairy Farmers Produce More Milk - Morning Edition.

Harvesting Crop Insurance Profits - WSJ Opinion. A proposal to tweak the crop insurance program to limit windfall payouts (h/t Big Picture Agriculture).

A Beautiful Salt Refinery That Looks Like Another Planet - Wired.  But see, National shame: 'A living hell' for slaves on remote South Korean islands. Salt field workers.

Falling Crude Prices Force Ethanol Makers to Take It on the Chin - Wall Street Journal

Our new pro-science pontiff: Pope Francis on climate change, evolution and the Big Bang - Wonkbook.  Also, see Pope Francis Has Declared War on Climate Deniers - The New Republic

The New Brand of Jesuit Universities - The Atlantic.  Notre Dame had a similar "what does it mean to be a Catholic University" discussion while I was there, but it was 85% Catholic students at the time.

The Man Who Invented Scotch Tape - Priceonomics

Say Goodbye To 'Made In China' - Bloomberg.  The sheer size of the Chinese steel industry is amazing.

Our New Politics of Torture - NY Review of Books.  On how Republicans have come to support torture.

The Steep Cost of America's High Incarceration Rate - WSJ Opinion (Two in one week. Crazy.)

What's Wrong With Georgia? - The Atlantic

Did Drought and Climate Change cause Middle Eastern states to collapse in 2014? - Juan Cole (Informed Comment)

Alaska's record-warm year in 2014 worries observers - LA Times

Why Can't the World's Best Army Win Wars?

 Reality is a bitch

James Fallows has an excellent cover story in the January/February issue of The Atlantic on why the most expensive and technologically superior army in the world can't win the wars our politicians send it to fight.  You have to read the whole thing, but here are a few highlights:

At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.
Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once....
Ours is the best-equipped fighting force in history, and it is incomparably the most expensive. By all measures, today’s professionalized military is also better trained, motivated, and disciplined than during the draft-army years......
Yet repeatedly this force has been defeated by less modern, worse-equipped, barely funded foes. Or it has won skirmishes and battles only to lose or get bogged down in a larger war. Although no one can agree on an exact figure, our dozen years of war in Iraq, Afghanistan, and neighboring countries have cost at least $1.5 trillion; Linda J. Bilmes, of the Harvard Kennedy School, recently estimated that the total cost could be three to four times that much. Recall that while Congress was considering whether to authorize the Iraq War, the head of the White House economic council, Lawrence B. Lindsey, was forced to resign for telling The Wall Street Journal that the all-in costs might be as high as $100 billion to $200 billion, or less than the U.S. has spent on Iraq and Afghanistan in many individual years.
Yet from a strategic perspective, to say nothing of the human cost, most of these dollars might as well have been burned. “At this point, it is incontrovertibly evident that the U.S. military failed to achieve any of its strategic goals in Iraq,” a former military intelligence officer named Jim Gourley wrote recently for Thomas E. Ricks’s blog, Best Defense. “Evaluated according to the goals set forth by our military leadership, the war ended in utter defeat for our forces.” In 13 years of continuous combat under the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the longest stretch of warfare in American history, U.S. forces have achieved one clear strategic success: the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Their many other tactical victories, from overthrowing Saddam Hussein to allying with Sunni tribal leaders to mounting a “surge” in Iraq, demonstrated great bravery and skill. But they brought no lasting stability to, nor advance of U.S. interests in, that part of the world. When ISIS troops overran much of Iraq last year, the forces that laid down their weapons and fled before them were members of the same Iraqi national army that U.S. advisers had so expensively yet ineffectively trained for more than five years.

There are a lot of things which contribute to our lack of success in the wars we fight: ignorance of other cultures, foolish civilian leadership, yes-man military brass, crooked contractors, an uninterested citizenry which is unwilling to sacrifice, but most significantly, stupid plans for post-war occupation and rebuilding.  The people who put forth the idea that we would be welcomed as liberators were either idiots or knaves.  We think we can convert others to our way-of-life at gunpoint, when we would never do the same if somebody else tried that here.  For some reason, we can't get through our fat heads that people whose family members are killed by our weapons are going to see us as occupiers, and we have neither the time, money or motivation to be British-style imperialists.  We've wasted 13 years and at least $1.5 trillion, and all we have to show for it is a few thousand dead Americans, a few dozen thousand dead Iraqis and Afghanis, and several failed states.  Even after all that, most of the American public won't even acknowledge that none of this was done to "protect our freedom."  We are idiots.  Anyway, read the article.  It is very good, but it understates how badly we've fucked things up since World War II.

Dick Cheney and Torture

David Bromwich has a fine essay linking American acceptance of police brutality with acceptance of torture.  It is well worth reading.  I found the description of Dick Cheney's role in pushing the U.S. to torture to be spot on:

The US national security state is the lengthened shadow of Dick Cheney. He made himself a master of the levers of government when he was secretary of defence under George H.W. Bush. His sense of rightful authority will have been confirmed by his regular participation in the continuity-of-government exercises: a yearly ritual enactment of the government’s response to a national catastrophe, begun in the Reagan years and put aside under Clinton, in which the lives of important members of the government and military were preserved at a fortress hideaway, and a design was worked up and executed for a post-constitutional order. An account of these exercises is given in James Mann’s excellent Rise of the Vulcans (2004); a curious detail is that Cheney and his associate Donald Rumsfeld stayed on as participants even when they held no government office.
After the real catastrophe of September 2001, Cheney succeeded in changing America’s idea of itself. He did it with a tireless diligence of manipulation behind the scenes, commonly issuing his orders from a bunker underneath the Naval Observatory in Washington. The element of fear in Cheney is strong: a fact that is often lost in descriptions of him as an undiluted malignity. His words and actions testify to a personal fear so marked that it could project and engender collective fear.
Cheney worked hard to eradicate from the minds of Americans the idea that there can be such a thing as a ‘suspect’. Due process of law rests on the acknowledged possibility that a suspect may be innocent; but, for Cheney, a person interrogated on suspicion of terrorism is a terrorist. To elaborate a view beyond that point, as he sees it, only involves government in a wasteful tangle of doubts. Cheney concedes from time to time that mistakes can happen; but the leading quality of the man is a perfect freedom from remorse. ‘I’d do it again in a minute,’ he said recently of the plan for the interrogation programme and the secret prisons which the office of the vice president vetted and approved.

Cheney is a coward of the first-order.  His demand that the CIA torture highlights his inability to deal with the very, very small chance that we might be subject to another terrorist attack.  He, amongst all the cowards and chickenhawks in the Bush administration, was ready to put other peoples' lives at risk to try to attain the unattainable: total security.  His resort to torture marks an all-time low amongst American statesmen.  All Americans in uniform are more likely to face torture if captured because of him.