Post Front Page--Politics and Reform

The Washington Post has two stories on its front page that relate, in a way. One is the second in its series on the DC school system. Today's is a review of the various efforts to reform the system over the years. Every few years new people come to power promising change and improvement, only to leave sometime later, either slinking out the door tired and defeated or thrown out by a new set of reformers. A theme is the power of the bureaucracy to frustrate change even at the cost of protecting incompetence. Another theme is unanticipated consequences--a court suit ends up depriving the system of money by forcing it to spend $50,000 per special ed student (if my quick math is right--$120 million divided by 2400 students?)

The other story is on the use of political connections to select immigration judges. It seems the Bush administration has been appointing judges with such ties.

What's the relationship? New leadership can exert its influence by appointing its people, as in the case of Bush and immigration judges. When it can't exert influence, as in the case of the DC schools, it can't be held responsible. So, bottom line, there's a case to be made for the old Jacksonian spoils system and against the goo-goo Progressive governmental reform people.

The Melting Pot Bubbles On

Had to laugh today at a piece in the NYTimes Style section, on "A Privileged Life, Celebrating WASP Style: "The pages gleam with iconic photographs of über-WASPs — William F. Buckley, George Plimpton, Jackie Onassis..."

The last I looked, WASP stood for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant; Mr. Buckley is, while an Anglophile, a very prominent Catholic and Jacqueline Bouvier was both Catholic and French. Not that I'd deny any one admission to the WASP club; I just marvel at the power of assimilation--what the economists call the first-mover advantage.

And How the Neighbors to the North Do It

Apparently as a percentage of net sales for most everything, including ostriches. See this news story and this web site on Canada's Cost of Production program to support farmers.

The process is intriguing--I need to look more at Canada's "supply management" program, which apparently still applies to dairy and poultry. And do they have no local offices--is everything done through the Internet?

LRECL and Mark Adamo

There's a recent report of research showing that infants are able to recognize the differences between languages. It's part of the innate and learned ability to categorize the "blooming, buzzing confusion"* of the world into something that makes sense.

Last night my wife and I went to the Kennedy Center for the last NSO concert of the year. Mark Adamo had a concerto for harp, a premiere well reviewed by the Post.

As I was sitting through it, I remembered the COBOL class where I first met my wife, where the instructor explained that computers only read binary, zeroes and ones, and that they had to be told how to handle the stream. LRECL was part of it--defining the logical record length (often a multiple of 80 characters, which was the maximum you could get on a punch card). You'd define the block size, which was how many characters the computer would eat at one gulp, then how many records were in the block--the LRECL, then the fields within the record and their length.

That's what babies do: they separate their experiences into chunks, defining what a word is, then make associations. That's how we learn to identify one cow from another (if you grow up on a small dairy farm) or one person from another, or one language from another.

Or, learn the language of classical music. Unfortunately, I haven't learned to be flexible enough to enjoy Mr. Adamo's concerto, I'm stuck back in the nineteenth century with Mahler's first, which was great.




* William James

The Virtues of Stovepipes

"Stovepipes" have gotten a bad name, both in IT and bureaucratic organization. It means that each organization/program has its own focus, its own data, its own concerns and doesn't share well with others. There's a case to be made in their defense, which is not a case I'll make today. But this article from Government executive, reporting that a subcommittee of the House Ag committee has voted to remove the ag inspectors from Homeland Security and put them back in USDA gives a sense of both the petty politics behind stovepiping and, in the comment, one of the virtues of stovepiping.

Loose Linkage on Immigration--see Passports

The administration has had to back off the rule that travelers within this hemisphere have passports, because the State Department's bureaucracy couldn't handle the backlog of applications. (People waiting until the last minute.) See this Government Executive piece.

That's the sort of thing one could expect if the immigration bill, that seems dead in the water, were to pass. What we could and should be doing is encouraging people to issue, and illegal immigrants to get, any form of ID possible (municipalities, consular ID's, etc.) with the idea that they'd be first in line for any future reform and they wouldn't suffer by doing so. That sort of halfway step is what I mean by loose linkage--easing people into the system, mostly for the benefit of the bureaucrats, but it will also benefit their clients.

Bureaucratic Interns

We die. Unfortunately.

Any self-perpetuating organization needs to recruit those who leave it on their way to the coffin. One way is internship. See Angry Drunk Bureaucrat's take.

(I'm not sure about the carbon paper though--maybe they didn't clean out the supply cabinet.)

Windows Vista and the Bureaucracy

As a result of PC problems, I'm now running Windows Vista (not my choice) and having problems getting old programs that ran under XP to work. So I read today that the Army medics are using software that runs under Windows 2000, and will only have new XP compatible software in 2008.

Our Tolerance Exceeds Our Knowledge

Via Crooked Timber, it seems that 83 percent of the population are okay with interracial dating but 74 percent believe the earth revolves around the sun (as opposed to vice versa or don't know). For someone who believes we're getting more and more knowledge, that's real depressing. But at least we can live together.

D-Day and Responsibility

The Post editorial page today notes June 6 by quoting the announcement that Eisenhower wrote to use if the D-Day landings failed. He took responsibility. The Post thinks it's a good model.

Causes me nostalgia. Perhaps the first "adult" book I ever read was Ike's "Crusade in Europe". It probably was a Christmas present for my father, who was into history and biography, for 1949. I very vaguely remember (I think) my grandfather trying desperately to get the news on our old radio--was it the Battle of the Bulge? Those old vacuum tube radios couldn't get good reception when the station was 10-15 miles away, considering the hills that surrounded us.

He wrote clear prose, not great, and didn't directly reveal how he felt dealing with the prima donas like Monty and Patton. Long before the Holocaust, he wrote about the freeing of prisoners from the concentration camps and included pictures.

I don't know whether it was the atmosphere of the time, knowing the importance the grownups placed on the events, or simply a small boy's fascination with things military, but I read and reread the book over the years.