How Bureaucrats Are Made--Kris Koth

One of the things I find fascinating about bureaucracy is how it is staffed. I'm going to make a generalization--for 100+ years the role of the USDA has been to provide jobs for children of farmers. Instead of farming full-time, they leave the farm and go to work for USDA, in the last 50 or so years after going to college and graduating from their state's land grant university. Sometimes they stay in their home state, sometimes they move elsewhere, to DC or Hawaii.

I don't mean that everyone who works for USDA in the field was raised on a farm, but that's the pattern. I suspect other bureaucracies have other patterns (like the Catholic church used to attract one boy from a large Irish family).

Here's a piece on someone who's following the pattern in Iowa.

The Iraq Index Today

Here's the May 29 version from Brookings. It's interesting--lots of the tables haven't been updated recently. I suspect it's because people have lost interest in the subject. (The people at Brookings just assembled data from various governments and organizations, they didn't do research themselves.)

The headline news is, of course, the 19 U.S. deaths in May are a low for the war since the first year. And there's been several optimistic articles and op-eds in the past few weeks, even though most of them don't get the attention of the past. I don't think that's liberal bias particularly--it's mostly the idea that conflict and bad news is lots more newsworthy than good news. It is true, though, that we liberals have a hard time fitting the news into our overall narrative so it's often easy to ignore.

Personally, I've a bureaucratic narrative--there's a learning curve, it's taken us 4-5 years to learn, but we're at last much improved over what we were at first. (You can see this in Vietnam, the last few years under Abrams were much more effective than the first years under Westmoreland.)

A couple factoids, without links: NYTimes had an article on the US prisons in Iraq--we're holding over 20,000 prisoners, of which about 1 percent are foreign. It's possible we killed most of the people who were willing to come to Iraq and die, or people just got tired after so many years, but it doesn't fit with a war against international terrorism. Attacks against oil infrastructure are way down this year--good news for the Iraqi economy and for our gas prices.

The Process of Certification and Proofing

I posted yesterday on the Iraqi bureaucrat whose signature is known all over. I post today on the explanation (in part) for the screwup on the farm bill. (The trade title was omitted in the version sent to the President.) This article from Politico describes the process by which a bill is sent to the President and blames Newt Gingrich for the penny-pinching which opened the loophole resulting in the problem. In brief, instead of printing two copies on parchment, proofing one, and sending the other to the President, he had them print the bill twice, once on plain paper. Somehow, between the first and second printing the title was dropped. Probably because each title was being treated as a document (or perhaps a subdocument with a master document). And the usual bureaucratic routine was being upset by the call for haste. As mom always said: "haste makes waste".

Forgive my enthusiasm for this detail--but it recalls the days when my office had to certify true and correct copies of regulations to be published in the Federal Register.

DC Gets Organic Fast Food

One of the interesting developments since the 1950's when mom first subscribed to Organic Gardening is all the cross-cutting currents in this area. There's the development of big food chains like Whole Foods that focus on the organic area, there's the development of Community supported agriculture chains, there's the "locavore" movement that would seem to reject organic food shipped in from abroad and accept hothouse food grown locally, there's the infighting among the various elements of the organic community over what the term means, there's the possibility of genetically modified organic food. And now, coming to DC, is organic fast food.

(I recognize this is an oversimplified summary. The bottom line is folks should be happy at the confusion and conflict--it all means people see a bandwagon passing by and they're jumping on.)

A Faceless Iraqi Bureaucrat

The Post has a fascinating (to me) article on an Iraqi bureaucrat:

The looped and dotted script of Abdul Ghani's signature is etched in rubber and slicked with ink. His signature is the final stamp of approval for many foreign matters involving Iraqi citizens.

"Every embassy in the world has a record of my signature," says Abdul, 28, leaning forward on his thick arms.

Apparently, he and other "authorizers" have to sign documents, like high school diplomas being used to apply to college abroad.

What's fascinating? Well, he is a faceless bureaucrat, but as he says, his signature is known. And before bureaucrats had signatures, they had seals, authenticating a document (i.e., like the Great Seal of the U.S. or the "signet" ring which was a more personal seal). Some movies make a big deal of the application of seals--like the warrant for execution of someone in British politics (Queen Mary, Cromwell, whoever). So on the one hand you have the anonymity of the bureaucrat, the document stating a bureaucratic rule without a hint of the author, but on the other hand you have the authentication, tracing the document back to some process with legitimacy.

There's Always Tradeoffs

From Saturday's LA Times:

Law enforcement officials estimate that as many as 1,000 of the 7,500 homes in this Humboldt County community are being used to cultivate marijuana, slashing into the housing stock, spreading building-safety problems and sowing neighborhood discord.

Indoor pot farms proliferated in recent years as California communities implemented Proposition 215, the statewide medical marijuana measure passed overwhelmingly a dozen years ago. A backlash over the effects and abuses of legally sanctioned marijuana growing has emerged in some of the most liberal parts of the state.

For example, in neighboring Mendocino County, a measure on Tuesday's election ballot seeks to repeal a local proposition passed eight years ago that decriminalized cultivation of as many as 25 pot plants.

The experience of Arcata, a bastion of cannabis culture, reveals the unintended consequences of the 1996 Compassionate Use Act, designed to provide relief to AIDS patients, cancer victims and others.

Why We Have Fast Food

This excerpt from 100 years ago says it all, via a Christian Science Monitor article on alternet:

"In 1907, Laura Clarke Rockwood wrote poignantly in The Craftsman magazine about the need to simplify housekeeping: "This mother of to-day hurries from kitchen to nursery and over the other parts of the house, performing as best she can the many home duties of our times. But she is so overwearied in the doing of it all that the deep well of mother love which should overflow, flooding the world with happiness and cheer, runs well nigh dry at times."

As one solution, Mrs. Rockwood proposed moving meal preparation out of the home: "There should be food kitchens easily accessible to every home where cooked foods can be bought cheaply because of consolidation, and delivered hot to our homes with promptness and regularity in pneumatic tubes perhaps, or by whatever means the master mind shall decide is the cheapest and the best.

A quote such as this tends to discredit ideas that fast food has been foisted on an unwilling populace.

High Gas Costs Hurt Rural Areas

This story about a rural district going to 4 days a week because of high fuel costs reminds us of tradeoffs. (If you remember, back in 1993 the new Clinton/Gore administration was pushing a carbon tax, then a gasoline tax, for environmental reasons. Their big opposition came from Western Democrats whose constituents need to drive long distances. Particularly on the High Plains you have to drive distances incredible to an Eastern city dweller.)

Problems of Rural Life

Include broadband access (or rather limits thereon) as John Phipps discovers when Apple upgrades its OS and he runs into download limits.

And too much to do, as Erin discovers.

Amish, Mennonites, and Tom Philpott

From the Brownfield Network, this report:

Amish and Mennonite farmers currently produce about 10 percent of Missouri’s fresh commercial vegetables, but 15 years ago that market didn’t exist. That’s according to the University of Missouri Extension, which has hosted workshops to teach growers about new farming techniques.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency provided a grant to help develop the workshops with MU. Extension Horticulture Specialist James Quinn says the EPA was interested in helping emphasize reduced pesticide applications with the Amish and Mennonite growers.

It's not clear from the broadcast whether the growers have been moving into the area or whether the market is new. The Amish have been expanding, courtesy of their high birth rate. And I know they've moved into new areas for them, like upstate New York, where they can find cheaper land to support their life style.

Meanwhile, from the organic ag movement, comes the news (a bit late) Tom Philpott has moved on from the NC farm he ran. No doubt he has good reasons for the change of occupation--he's now full time at Grist. But it fuels my cynicism, nurtured over the years of community gardening watching people come and go, that for many in the movement it's a phase, rather than a livelihood. That's not the case for the Amish--it's a way of life. One might view the organic /locavore niche as the scene of a contest between Amish and "crunchies". Given the rate of natural increase and the community share, the Amish will win. In another 50 years farming in the U.S. will be divided between the Amish and the Mennonites, and a few surviving megafarms.