The death of organic foods?

Why You Can Now Kiss Organic Beef, Dairy and Many Vegetables Goodbye. Actually, this came from the NC links, but I'll highlight another one later.  I have to say that I haven't understood the whole organic market in the first place.  While we may not be able to use mined phosphorus and potash indefinitely in the future, I never understood why they couldn't be used in organic farming.  I can't imagine producing large amounts of milk and meat using feed raised without herbicides and commercial fertilizers.  Dairymen have enough trouble getting all their field work done on a daily basis while using herbicides, let alone trying to cultivate all their fields several times.

Why revolution begins in cities

This post by Edward Glaeser is pretty interesting.  From 1566 to today, he highlights how political uprisings and riots are unthinkable without the density of our cities. 

Cities are places of revolution, because urban proximity connects organizers of opposition. Large urban populations create the scale needed to initially overwhelm local law enforcement. The physical barriers that occur in cities make it difficult for troops to maneuver and disperse demonstrators.
And the economic importance of cities means that citywide demonstrations can disrupt the economic heart of a nation. Cities also create the social exchanges between soldiers and citizens, such as the food-sharing between protesters and the military, that can be so fatal for military discipline.
Isolated farms are stable; cities are not. The constant interaction of human energy in dense clusters creates innovations in every area of human life, including politics. Instability is scary, especially for people who already enjoy freedom, peace and prosperity and therefore have much to lose.

This gets to the heart of my explanation of why urban areas tend to vote overwhelmingly Democratic and rural areas tend to vote overwhelmingly Republican.  Folks in urban areas can easily imagine being overwhelmed by an angry mob, while rural people really can't fathom such a circumstance.  I think another interesting point made in the article is this:

By contrast, the United States has maintained political stability through countless riots by summoning troops with little empathy for the rioters, like the farm-boy soldiers who surely had little fondness for the urban, often immigrant, draft resisters of 1863 New York.

I think we saw that same dynamic in the aftermath of Katrina.  The book Zeitoun deals with this issue a little bit.  I highly recommend it.

Vacant houses

CNBC:

More concerning than the home ownership rate is the vacancy rate. The Census tables don't tell the entire story, but they tell a lot of it. Of the nearly 131 million housing units in this country, 112.5 million are occupied. 74.8 million are owned, and that's only dropped by about 30 thousand in the past year. 38 million are rented, but that's up by over a million year over year. That means more new households are choosing to rent.

Now to vacancies. There were 18.4 million vacant homes in the U.S. in Q4 '10 (11 percent of all housing units vacant all year round), which is actually an improvement of 427,000 from a year ago, but not for the reasons you'd think.

This seems pretty high, I'd like to see a graph for multiple quarters.

Poor Carson

From the Onion:

CINCINNATI—Claiming that the phone had been ringing off the hook all morning, Bengals owner and general manager Mike Brown told reporters Tuesday that representatives from every NFL franchise had contacted the Bengals organization to insist they absolutely do not want quarterback Carson Palmer. "As soon as the news got out that Carson wanted to be traded, coaches and general managers were just clamoring to let me know what a bad fit he would be for any team wanting to win football games," said Brown, adding that he was also contacted by several CFL teams expressing their uninterest in the Bengals starting quarterback. "Some teams have been hounding me five or six times a day just to let me know how badly they didn't want to see Carson Palmer in one of their uniforms next year." Brown confirmed that at least two dozen teams had offered the Bengals draft picks in exchange for a guarantee that the organization wouldn't try to make a deal for Palmer.

Preparation for Wednesday

This will get the fat guy across the partition dancing.

The Bengals Future

Earlier today, some one mentioned the possibility of Mike Brown moving the Bengals to LA.  My take on that rumor is that there is no way in hell that he would move the team out there and remain the owner, because there is no way he could possibly fit in to LA.  That man is the anti-LA, he'd get laughed out of town.  Plus, he could never bring himself to buy a house out there, he'd cry when he looked at the prices.

Ohio Budget

Governor Kasich's first homework assignment is due in 6 weeks.  I am sure counties, cities, villages, school districts and libraries are waiting with baited breath.  The potential $8-10 billion budget hole was scary enough, without figuring in the governor's promise to put in place the final installment of the income tax cut which was put on hold to balance the budget last year.  Why he is insisting on pushing through that final bit, in the face of the giant deficit, I just don't understand.  Unless the governor privatizes everything he can get his hands on (which I think will only screw over taxpayers in the long haul), schools and local governments will be forced to cut jobs and provide a drag against any private sector rehiring. Cuts in Medicaid will put greater strains on hospitals and nursing homes. Cutting the income tax only makes the problem $400 million dollars worse each year.  March 15 will be an interesting day, but there will still be a lot of haggling before things are finalized June 30.  In the meantime, schools and local governments will be scrambling to figure out how to fill in the holes for any cuts in the local government fund.  That will be a major undertaking, and will probably cancel out the minor improvements we've seen in the private sector.  Good luck, governor.

Why do Republicans hate the NSF?

I hadn't closely examined the spending cuts proposed by Rand Paul, but a reader at The Daily Dish made this comment:

What struck me most about the Rand Paul’s budget proposals were the extremely deep cuts to the National Science Foundation (62% !?).   This is in addition to significant cuts to the National Institute of Health,  the Centers for Disease Control,  abolition of the Department of Energy.  The Rand Paul budget would be a devastating blow to the sciences in the United States of America.
What is striking (and some of this may be due to omissions in the Washington Examiner article) are the choices of things that are not touched:  Agriculture subsidies (direct farm payments are about $20B annually versus $7B for the entire NSF budgets),  subsidies for oil,  gas or coal, etc.   These are things that Paul apparently feels are more important ways to spend money than basic sciences.

Now this isn't the first time that I've seen Republicans proposing cuts to the National Science Foundation.  Is $7 billion a year spent on science research extremely wasteful?  That's about $25 per person in the US.  I mean, $100 wouldn't even get a family of four into Kings Island.  Why is this a target for cuts?  I knew a couple of guys who got NSF grants, and I can say, they were pretty darn smart.  I'd take a risk on investing in what they were working on.  I'd guess we spend $7 billion a year in Afghanistan and Iraq fixing things we blew up.  My recommendation would be to keep investing in the NSF, and stop blowing shit up in other countries.

This brings back memories

Awesome letter to the sports editor

Gil Meche compared to the titans of finance.  Very funny. (h/t Balloon Juice)