Dwelling Place of Dragons, Book Report

I promised to report once I'd read my cousin's book, Dwelling Place for Dragons. (The title is from Jeremiah 51:37, King James version:"And Babylon shall become heaps, a dwelling place for dragons, an astonishment, and an hissing, without an inhabitant.") The cover of the book shows orange and green dragons encircling an abandoned Irish cottage.

The time is 1830 or so to 1849, the place is Newry, Ulster, and its environs. The main characters are James Harshaw, Presbyterian elder and farmer; John Martin, nephew of James, a younger and more well-to-do farmer, college educated, a member of "Young Ireland"; and George Henderson, friend and classmate of John, editor of the Newry Telegraph, and supporter of the established order.

The book provides insight into:

• the interplay among religious groups and political and religious leaders: Daniel O'Connell and his son leading the Repeal Association and the Catholic Church on one side, the Protestants groups and the Orange marching order on the other, and the people in the middle, the British establishment ruling the country and the Young Ireland movement, representing a more secular (or at least cross-religious) nationalism, a conservative radicalism. (The whole mess parallels Iraq today, with religious parties dominant and the secularists isolated.)
  
• the agitation for Repeal of the Act of Union (which put Ireland under the British Parliament instead of having their own parliament under Queen Victoria).
• the famine, and the disputes over how to provide relief.
  
• world affairs, particularly the Revolution in France of 1848, which revived the revolutionary enthusiasm of 1789 (read Jefferson from Paris) and seemed to prefigure revolution in other countries (I was also reminded of 1968, with all the upheavals around the world)
  
• British politics, the alternation of Whig and Tories, the repeal of the Corn Laws which hurt the Irish farmers (I was reminded of the protests of Mexican corn farmers against the lowering of trade barriers through NAFTA), and the response of the British governing classes and those in Ulster to the agitation over Repeal and then over the response to the famine
  

It's published under Amazon's Booksurge program (i.e. print on demand, self published). Is it a great read? No, not compared to a David McCullough. The great virtue of the book is that it's very much tied to the available data so that the events of "history" are seen through the focus on the three men and Newry. Marjorie relies on original source material, most notably the James Harshaw diaries and Henderson's Newry Telegraph (newspaper). Her sources don't permit flights of fancy nor great insight into personalities. The book climaxes with the conviction of John Martin, who was sentenced to be transported "beyond the seas" for 10 years for advocating the overthrow of Queen Victoria. His ship leaves Ireland just before the violence at Dolly's Brae between the Orange Order marchers and the Catholic Ribbonmen.

Marjorie mostly sticks to the facts, without editorializing. [Actually, that statement may be wrong. It may just be that her judgments agree with mine, dislike for religious extremism and a regard for those who tried to take a different course.] It's her first book, and hopefully not the last.

Two Years of Posting

Yesterday marked my 2-year anniversary of blogging. It's been interesting, if not very adventurous. (Do you expect adventure from a retired bureaucrat?) Maybe I'll do better in the new year, that is, right after I get myself and my office organized.

Why CEO's Earn Their Pay

John Phipps provides a quote from Davos, via the NYTimes . (The context is a clueless CEO trying to prep for a PR appearance.)

Sensitive But Unclassified--Bureaucratic Boundary Setting

Elizabeth Williamson in the Post had an article on Sensitive But Unclassified (SBU) markings (things like "For Official Use Only", etc.). These are stamps that government agencies use when they can't justify a "Confidential, Secret, or Top Secret" classification. It seems that they pose a big threat to the information sharing deemed essential to combat terrorism, because each different marking carries its own rules for dissemination and there are 108 different ones. So if the FBI sends info to the state police who relay it down to county sheriffs things can get confused. There's a committee working on simplifying this (to improve the "information-sharing environment").

Why so many SBU's? It's a combination of reasons.

• The official classification system is limited and rigid--only three markings so they have been amplified by modifications.
  
• Bureaucrats are scared--suppose this paper leaks to the Post, that would be embarassing. Or even if it reaches the local gossip. (The Plame affair revealed that even deputy Secretaries of State can love their gossip.)
• There's the high school clique reaction: we know something you don't, ha ha ha.
• Most of all, bureaucrats love to set boundaries and SBU's are a way of marking them.
  

Is it all bad? No. I'm reading William Easterly's "The White Man's Burden". He makes the point that a bureaucracy (foreign aid/foreign development type agency) that tries to do everything (and that has multiple "principals" to report to) is prone to failure. So a bureaucracy that is focused on doing one thing is more apt to be successful.

The problem we have in homeland security is that our bureaucracies have each had their own objective(s). When the global war on terrorism came along, we superimposed new objectives on the old and we still haven't straightened things out yet.

Iraq as a Land of Free Enterprise

"Imperial Life in the Emerald Palace", about which I blogged here, notes several instances where Bremer's people wanted to reform Iraq into a free market economy. Remember that when you read this George Buddy quote of a Guardian article on Iraq, the reporter interviewing a Sunni insurgent who says:

"'I used to attack the Americans when that was the jihad. Now there is no jihad. Go around and see in Adhamiya [the notorious Sunni insurgent area] - all the commanders are sitting sipping coffee; it's only the young kids that are fighting now, and they are not fighting Americans any more, they are just killing Shia. There are kids carrying two guns each and they roam the streets looking for their prey. They will kill for anything, for a gun, for a car and all can be dressed up as jihad.'

Rami was no longer involved in fighting, he said, but made a tidy profit selling weapons and ammunition to men in his north Baghdad neighbourhood."

Nice to know we're making progress.

"Industrial" Farmers

John Phipps has an interesting piece on "industrial" agriculture here (pdf)

Imperial Life and Harvard Business

Just finished reading Imperial Life in the Emerald City, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran (spelled the name without looking, though I did doublecheck--guess I'm not senile quite yet). Interesting, depressing, in line with Tom Ricks Fiasco, Woodward's State of Denial, etc. A couple of comments from a bureaucratic standpoint:

• one of the things an established bureaucracy does is reproduce itself. In other words, it develops patterns of recruitment and training for its employees. The American effort in Iraq, whether Garner's effort or the Coalition Provisional Authority, wasn't a developed bureaucracy. As a result, the recruitment seems to have been haphazard and the training nonexistent. I'm sort of reminded of an old cartoon, perhaps from Disney, where the lead character, an inventor, puts together a super-duper vacuum cleaner, turns it on, and the suction pulls in everything that isn't firmly nailed down. Iraq seems to have had the same effect: pulling in a bunch of young aspiring types, some older people nearing the end of their working life with expertise that might relate to CPA's needs, and a few people in the middle of their careers. It was a natural reaction to the situation: no planning, reliance on who knows who (which leads to political connections being importance), etc.
• a number of bureaucracies ended up in Iraq: CPA, State, DOD, contractors. What's striking is management's failure to ensure the bureaucracies were permeable. It would have been a much smaller book if he didn't have the anecdotes about bureacratic conflicts within the US occupation.

The picture of the insularity of the Green Zone (the "Emerald City") reminded me of Long Binh in Vietnam.

Finally, it seems to me that Harvard should revoke and disown a certain MBA.

EWG Has a Blog

Because I often blog on farm programs, it's appropriate to welcome Ken Cook and his Environmental Working Group to the world of blogging here. I don't expect to agree with him most of the time, but differences make the world interesting.

The Twists and Turns of Public Policy

NY Times has a business article saying that commodity index firms are investing more money in commodity futures, perhaps leading to more volatility. Meanwhile, Tom Friedman reports in his op-ed that his daffodils bloomed in January (mine didn't) and voices a call for a Green New Deal. And the Times world news has an article whose lede (first time I've used that term--gosh, I feel all knowledgeable and hip) is:

"Facing public outrage over the soaring price of tortillas, President Felipe Calderón abandoned his free-trade principles on Thursday and forced producers to sign an agreement fixing prices for corn products."

We liberals want to fight global warming, so we encourage ethanol production, particularly when we're seeking the Presidency and it's primary time in Iowa. But on other days we also complain about farm programs, as undeserved rewards to big industrial agribusiness. Those of us focused on foreign lands worry about the impacts of cheap US corn on poor Mexican peasant farmers, observing that if they can't be kept on the farm, they'll end up in the US.

But that's last years politics. Now it seems that demand for ethanol, sparked by high oil prices and government supports, has taken off at the same time the uncounted millions of Chinese have earned enough money to start eating meat, good corn-fed meat, sending corn prices high. (Soybeans are up too, but not as high.) So high corn prices are bad for the Mexican poor, who need protection. (Not sure if high corn prices will drive the urban worker to the U.S, but it won't help the evolution of democracy in Mexico.) Of course, capping the corn price in Mexico hurts those farmers remaining on the land.

Meanwhile, the volatility of corn prices resulting from the market dynamics (demand is relatively inelastic--it takes lots of meat eating Chinese and new ethanol plants to move the price) may be accentuated by boomer money flowing into index funds that seek the next hot commodity (gold and copper have had their runs, now it's time for ag commodities).

What's missed here is the relationship of farm programs and volatility. Farm commodities are much more volatile than other commodities (just watch your California navel oranges go up in price). Over the years, that uncertainty has led to the creation of programs to lessen risk, which continues even now.

Sentence of the Year! (So Far)

"After watching today's procession, it occurred to me that people inside the Beltway (a precondition for service) are far more normal than they get credit for."

From John Dickerson's piece on the Scooter Libby trial in Slate.