Progressive Lenses vs Bifocals

This week I got new glasses. I've been wearing bifocals for 20 years, but finally decided to spend the money for "progressive lenses"--$340. With bifocals you were either looking close or looking long, a binary condition. With progressive lenses it's gradations. In either case you adjust by tilting your head to adjust the line of sight, which I hope will become automatic after awhile. Amazing what humans can get used to if they have to.

More Immigrants Less Crime?

That's the theme of an article in the NYTimes magazine last weekend:

The most prominent advocate of the “more immigrants, less crime” theory is Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard. A year ago, Sampson was an author of an article in The American Journal of Public Health that reported the findings of a detailed study of crime in Chicago. Based on information gathered on the perpetrators of more than 3,000 violent acts committed between 1995 and 2002, supplemented by police records and community surveys, it found that the rate of violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.

If I follow the argument, immigrants, at least some groups of immigrants, bring social capital, incentives, and relationships to the U.S. that makes them less likely to commit crime. That is, legal immigrants have their families and a strong family culture; illegal immigrants want to keep out of sight of the police because the consequence is going back home. (So much for locking them up.) The bad side of the argument is that as their kids grow up American, they commit more crime. It's interesting, though I'm not totally convinced.

Author Author (in the Family)

My cousin, Marjorie Harshaw Robie, has just published "Dwelling Place of Dragons: An Irish Story".

Despite the title, I understand it's based on the diaries of James Harshaw, a Presbyterian in Ulster during the middle of the 19th century. For more, see here.

I'm getting it for Christmas and will report on it when I've read it. But family loyalty says it's unfortunate the timing is too late for the NYTimes books of the year list.

Tit for Tat in Palestine

Over the years some supporters of Israel pointed to the schoolbooks Palestinian children are given. The books don't show Israel on their maps of the Mid-East, they show nothing or "Palestine". These supporters have scored points in the debate. Obviously the PLO and Arafat did not accept the existence of Israel as a state if they couldn't change the map.

It's always been my assumption, being the young and naive person that I am, that Israel's schoolbooks showed Palestine. Wrong. Israel always called the PLO a terrorist organization with which they could not negotiate so they got themselves into a map trap of their own. Today's Washington Post has an article showing that a minister in the government is trying to change the policy, but meeting resistance:

Israel's policy of not marking the West Bank began soon after it captured the territory from Jordan in the 1967 war. Most school maps now evoke Jewish history by labeling the territory by the Biblical terms "Judea and Samaria."

In defending her order in interviews with Israeli reporters Tuesday, Tamir [the minister] noted the difficulty in pressuring Arab countries to mark Israel on maps when the Jewish state does not designate the West Bank as a separate entity on its own maps. She told Israel's Army Radio that "if we don't show these borders, we will turn out very confused children."

Contracting Out and the Learning Curve

George Buddy had a piece on contracting that started with peeling potatoes on KP (for whippersnappers, "KP" stands for "kitchen police" which means young recruits doing scut duty for chiefs in the days before it was contracted out). Separate pieces of news today say: we have 100,000 contractors in Iraq; the inspector generals of State and DOD say that the contractors doing training of police in Afghanistan haven't produced a good police force; the FBI is having mixed success with its new computer modernization contract.

IMO "contracting out" works okay when the agency doing the contracting understands what's going on and doesn't need to learn anymore (like peeling potatoes). If you don't understand how to do the job successfully or it's too difficult to learn, then the contract is just passing a hot potato; it's bad for the agency, bad for the taxpayer, and bad for the recipient of the service.

"Specialty Crops" and the New Farm Bill

Interesting, if confusing, piece in yesterday's NYTimes business section discussing specialty crops and an effort they're putting on to get more government aid. California garlic growers and Washington apple growers are feeling the heat from imports from China. They've constructed a coalition and are laying down a market in preparation for the new farm bill (2007).

When you research on http://www.thomas.gov, the bill referred to in the piece is HR 6193, Eat Healthy America Act. Most of the bill looks to be extensions and tweaks of provisions attractive to various constituencies, explaining why a whole mess of representatives joined in sponsoring the bill back in September (i.e., before the election--surprise!). The stuff for specialty crops looks mostly to be expansions of existing programs (for example, the 2002 farm bill had $2 million for technical assistance for exports of specialty crops, the new one bumps it up in stages to $10 million. ) There's also interesting language changes. Usually legislation authorizes
expenditures subject to the money being actually appropriated. If I understand section 802, in at least one instance they're trying to bypass the appropriation process and just use Commodity Credit Corporation funds. That's significant, because it's not unusual for Congress to authorize $20 billion for education (as an example) and just appropriate $5 billion. They've also included a $9 million transfer from CCC each year for AMS and market news services.

If you can judge the coalition's publicity by the Times article, it's people (like now defeated Rep. Pombo trying to convince farmers they're being helped rather than convincing the American public of the worth of the program.

Credit Score/Security Score

ABC does a followup piece on the "Automated Targeting System"--the automated tracking of travelers into and out of the U.S. that was revealed through a Privacy Act Notice in the Federal Register. As best we understand, the system gathers information on people (destinations, how paid for, etc.), accumulates it over time and generates an "assessment" which is capable of being expressed as a numeric score. Senator Leahy and others have problems with it.

I don't, not really. Yes, there's problems because the system was set up years ago and they just got around to publishing the required FR notice on "systems of records". That was wrong. But the basic idea is okay by me--tracking someone's history is a good and valid way of assessing them and the data captured doesn't seem particularly sensitive to me.

I do have problems with the Privacy Act itself--it should be updated in the light of the Internet to require government agencies to make accessible, ideally notify people, of the information they have on file. (It was written in the 70's.) Look at the credit scores that credit reporting bureaus keep. We've finally advanced to the point where people are entitled to a free credit report yearly. Social Security gives you a yearly report summarizing the wages they've recorded for you. Why shouldn't other agencies do similar things? If HSD were doing that, they'd have a lot more support and a lot less paranoia in the country. IMO transparency is key.

Consequences of "Perfect Payments"

I posted earlier on making a perfect payment system. Forgot to add--one consequence of the system is that it reduces the number of bureaucrats needed. Is that bad? Not if you're a taxpayer. But if you're in a county seat in a rural county that's been losing population for decades and fighting for every person, it's not good.

Shock, Shock--Democrats Renege on Promise

The worldly-wise Washington cynic is not surprised by this article in the Post .
The most important recommendation of the 9/11 commission was for Congress to redo its oversight structure. Currently there are the House and Senate Intelligence committees to provide oversight, but there are also subcommittees of Ways and Means and Senate Appropriations who provide the money. So Negroponte, Hayden, et.al. have 4 different bodies to deal with. The commission recommended a consolidation, the Democrats during the campaign promised to implement all the recommendations (which the Republicans had failed to do), but now they're backing off. Why--because someone would lose power.

Getting Congress to reorganize itself is almost hopeless. The structure of committees overseeing USDA still reflect struggles back in Theodore Roosevelt's day. Maybe someday people will realize how little effective oversight Congress provides. And maybe someday people will live to 110. Bet on the latter before the former.

Is Iraq in a Civil War?

This post was started several days ago. Meanwhile the discussion of whether Iraq is in a civil war has only accelerated. Lehrer News Hour had a discussion last night. Both the Times and Post have pieces today on the issue. The Post in particular has some good points on the relation between language and reality: If you call it a "civil war", that might tell potential participants it's time to pick up weapons and fight. On the other hand, if you don't call it "civil war" you run the risk of losing credibility. (On that point, I'm reminded of Vietnam in February 68. The administration had been optimistic for years. When Tet came, they lost most of their credibility among the center. This was true even though the military would say that Tet was a defeat for the Viet Cong/North Vietnam. Lesson: Words matter, just as reality does.)

John Hinderaker at Powerline posts on Iraq statistics, arguing the situation is not as bad as the media says and does not constitute a civil war. (See also here.) His arguments have included the idea that the casualty rate is less than in the U.S. Civil War, that most of the country is peaceful except for Baghdad, and that the violent death rate in Bagdad is close to or only a small multiple of the murder rate in American cities at some times.

I'd make some counter arguments:
1 The Iraq population today is about 26.7 million; the US population in 1860 was 34.3 million. Over the course of the Civil War, the killed in action averaged 3,846 a month, the October Iraq figure was 3706. See this LSU site on the Civil War.
2 Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address famously said: "We draw deep comfort from the fact that in July of this year, the country was peaceful except for small areas around Vicksburg, Mississippi and Gettysburg, Pennsylvania."
3 Lawyer Hinderaker should realize violent deaths within a legal system, however much the criminal justice system was challenged in DC in the past, damage the social fabric much less vigilante justice than the sort of militia violence we see in Iraq.

An additional note: I bolded "killed" because it helps my argument. Most of the deaths in the Civil War were from disease, not bullets. Whether the appropriate comparison for Iraq is KIA or military deaths is debatable, but I'd lean to KIA.