An Accomplishment of the Republican Majority (1995-2006)

I was googling on dairy and Watergate and hit this article in Reason .

I can't resist quoting the last paragraph:

"Dairy price supports will be phased out by 2000, thanks to the 1996 farm bill. But throwing programs that were ill-conceived and illegitimate to begin with out of the federal realm and into regionalized cartels is no improvement. As states and localities step forward to shoulder formerly federal burdens, they need to ask not just who should manage a given program but whether it should exist at all. For now, regional cartels seem prepared to make sure that famous milk moustache continues to hide the sly grin of agribusiness as it milks the public."

Of course, they were prematurely optimistic about the end of price supports. Indeed, the Republicans (and Democrats) in the 2002 Farm Bill seem to have added programs. In the old days (tell it, grandpa) FSA/ASCS had little direct contact with dairy farmers, except for cost-sharing for liming or farm ponds under ACP. The dairy program operated through the processors, not directly with farmers. That's changed.

Lame Excuses and Contracting Out

The Times has an article today (Post had one yesterday) on the Coast Guard's ill-fated Deepwater program for getting a new fleet of ship and planes. One thing I learned in the 1970's when I was programming (in COBOL). The computer does not hiccup. It may be frustrating, but when you're writing and testing a program, it's not the computer's fault when it doesn't work, it's yours. An excerpt:

"In September 2004, more serious flaws in the boat conversion program became obvious after the first one, the Matagorda, was launched. As it traveled in relatively heavy seas from Key West to Miami, large cracks appeared in the hull and deck.

Giant steel straps that looked like Band-Aids were affixed to the side of the boats, and the vessels were barred from venturing out in rough water. But cracks and bulges continued to scar the Matagorda and other converted ships, followed by a series of mechanical problems.

Bollinger, it turned out, had overestimated how much stress the modified boats could handle, a miscalculation it cannot fully explain. “The computer broke for some reason,” said T. R. Hamlin, a senior Bollinger manager. “Whether it was a power surge or something, who knows?” The cursory oversight by the Coast Guard meant the mistake was not caught in time."

That excuse is worse than: "my dog ate my homework". Any professional organization would have its power supply regulated.

Overall, the article is cautionary. If memory serves, the former deputy of Homeland Security was the admiral who used to head the Coast Guard. He got good ink from the media, which seems now to have been undeserved. To make a long story short: the Coast Guard lacks sex appeal so it's had trouble getting money to maintain and replace its equipment. So someone (the admiral? or an eager staffer) came up with an idea: package all its needs in one package that big contractors would bid on, spreading the work around to locations that would pull in enough members of Congress to get approval for the appropriations. It worked, except the contractors (a partnership of Lockheed and Northrup (and I'd cynically believe that the partnership in itself contributed to problems)) contracted out much of the work (i.e., to Bollinger) and the Coast Guard trusted its contractors. They forgot Reagan's advice about verifying.

What Was I Reading This Morning

In the Washington Post, the headline reads:

'I'm Not Turnin' Loose of It Until We Get It Right'

At first glance you might think it was George W. talkin' about Iraq.

Then you read the article and this quote:

"It kind of tears me apart," [he] said in an interview. "In life I've had other times like this. You ask yourself: 'How did I get here? How do I get back? And how do I learn from this?' You have to face where you are. Don't be blind to the truth. Otherwise, you can't fix it."

and you know it's Joe Gibbs about the Redskins.

Joe Gibbs for President.

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.