After his very impressive outing on Sunday, Adrian Peterson’s photo was chosen for this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated:
That’s great, but I do feel sorry for Cleveland’s number 52: he makes the cover too, but not at all the way you want to be shown to a national audience.
Gregg Easterbrook looks at the accomplishments of Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday:
Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug’s arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.
After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”
Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.
“Without high-yield agriculture,” Borlaug said, “increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion.” Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.
So much for any realistic hope that the Obama administration was making a clean break from the anti-civil liberty policies of the former Bush administration:
The Obama administration has told Congress it supports renewing three provisions of the Patriot Act due to expire at year’s end, measures making it easier for the government to spy within the United States.
In a letter to Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Justice Department said the administration might consider “modifications” to the act in order to protect civil liberties.
“The administration is willing to consider such ideas, provided that they do not undermine the effectiveness of these important authorities,” Ronald Weich, assistant attorney general, wrote to Leahy, whose committee is expected to consider renewing the three expiring Patriot Act provisions next week. The government disclosed the letter Tuesday.
It’s funny how certain laws — in the hands of the opposition, anyway — are evil, wrong, and fattening, but miraculously transmogrify into essential tools of state once you’re the one in power. It doesn’t seem to matter which party you’re talking about either.
Cory Doctorow sent a Twitter message yesterday, linking to the OpenRightsGroup.org petition page:
The freedom for each and everyone of us to express our views on the internet is under threat like never before. The UK government is now considering laws that would allow individuals to be cut off from the internet. They say the reason is to protect the economic prosperity of the creative industries.
Our coalition comprises organisations, charities and people who believe disconnection from the internet would mean that people like us would be unable to engage in banking, socialising, campaigning, home admin and many other activities that are increasingly moving online. Worse, disconnection would restrict our long standing right of freedom of expression just at the time when we all need to be able to critique and engage more than ever.
If Lord Mandelson’s plan becomes law, disconnection may start for copyright infringement, with no guarantee it would not be extended for other things.
You don’t have to have much imagination to come up with lots of ways this little policy initiative could go pear-shaped very quickly. Pear-shaped, that is, for the poor folks caught up in the legal machinery. ASBOs were a terrible notion — and appear to be worse in practice than anyone thought when they were first introduced, but they’ll pale into insignificance if this horrible idea gets accepted by the government.
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