Things I Thought, Read or Heard – And Maybe Something I Made Up.
March 3, 2009 I was in my orthopedic surgeon’s office the other day — an office I am seeing too much of lately, I am sorry to say — and picked up a copy of Smithsonian magazine to read …
… Okay, I made that up — ostensibly I picked it up to look at the pretty pictures, but something in Letters to the Editor caught my eye. And understand that the chances of my eye catching anything in Smithsonian’s Letters to the Editor is almost nil, what with the pretty pictures and all.
Anyway, the subject was organic crops and there was a letter from Dean O. Cliver, a professor in the Department of Population Health and Reproduction at the University of California-Davis. I thought, uh oh — Smithsonian, organic, UC-Anything-is-liberal … we are about to get nailed. But …
“ … In my food safety courses here at the University of California at Davis, I tell students that the greatest challenge to humanity has been competition for our food supply. Competitors include bacteria and fungi; insects, rodents and birds; animals larger than people; other people; and the internal combustion engine, via ethanol. I have no magic answer to feeding the world, but regressive technology, including organic farming, can only make things worse. In affluent countries such as the United States, organic farming strikes me as elitist.”
I’m good with that.
At the National Cotton Council’s Annual meeting in Austin, TX, in early February, Michael Gerson was a featured speaker. I admit that I had never heard of him, but it didn’t take long to be reminded of one of my favorite raconteurs — P. J. O’Rourke. O’Rourke was Rolling Stone magazine’s war correspondent — if you can imagine Rolling Stone having a war correspondent in the first place — during Desert Storm.
But back to Gerson. Gerson served as the chief speech writer in the Bush II Administration until last June. He coined the phrase “Axis of Evil,” which Bush used to refer to Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Gerson was also called “the conscience of the White House.”
Here are a few things he said that made me laugh out loud:
• “We have Joe Biden analyzing Barak Obama. Racial condescension is always a good way to begin the first stage of your presidential campaign.”
• “Al Gore has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He won’t win. We have fixed the voting machines.”
• “Karl Rove said to me once, ‘I used to be a geek like you, but I got over it.’”
• “One of the best things about being a speech writer for a President of the United States is that when he is giving a speech, you secretly know you are quoting yourself.”
• “On the day President Bush gives the State of the Union speech, he sits down with all the network anchors for discussion. Peter Jennings once asked him, ‘What’s it like to go before the nation and read someone else’s words?’ The President immediately replied, ‘You do it every night.’”
Also at the Annual Meeting, the National Cotton Council released its cotton planting intentions report for 2007. If there was ever a case of something being both startling and expected at the same time, this was it. I think everyone suspected that acreage was going to take a serious hit, but we just didn’t want to face the reality of being right.
NCC set cotton acreage at 13.21 million acres, a decrease of 14.1% from 2006.
States seeing the biggest drops, as you would expect, are the ones that can make a smooth switch from cotton to corn. Those would be Alabama (472,000 acres; down 22.1%), Georgia (1.072 million; down 23.5%), North Carolina (669,000; down 23.2%) and Mississippi (929,000; down 23.8%). Louisiana will have the biggest reduction of all: 411,000 acres in 2007, down 34.8%. Texas’ acreage was down from 6.4 million acres to 5,995, a drop of 6.3%.
For the complete report, see: http://www.cotton.org/news/meetings/2007annual/plantint.cfm
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