Those Germans Loved Their Beer

Here's a map showing the saloons/bars in a German area of NYC (the eleventh ward) in 1885. It leaves me with a puzzle--according to the story Germans were good drinkers (i.e., orderly) in NYC, yet my mother, born of German parents in NYC (they moved to upstate NY farm shortly after) was death on alcohol.

Bureaucrats Are Not Liberals, or They Don't Listen to Radio

A small piece in today's Post mentions the reprogramming of a radio station--dropping its liberal programs. It was the last liberal commercial station in the DC area and its last ratings were too small to measure.

ACRE and Bureaucracy

An excerpt from a discussion of the ACRE program at DTN (subscription required):

I think the primary concern with ACRE is the administrative burden. Proving yields and keeping records straight at the FSA office could be a Herculean effort even for a 1,000 acre farm. And who wants to share all that proprietary information. And is there some ridiculous cross compliance between landowners? So if one little old lady bows out, your work is in vain?

Notice EQUIP with Tier 1, 2, 3 funding failed to launch for the same bureaucratic reasons. It just plain disappeared.

Maybe FSA finally did it, they developed a program so complex that even they don't understand it!

Comments:

• note that these days a 1,000 acre farm leaps to the tongue as an example of a small farm. Just a generation ago Jane Smiley wrote her novel of that title as an example of a large farm, a kingdom even (she based her plot on King Lear).
• several comments to the post, all interesting, a couple on the challenge to FSA. Some confusion evident, and these are farmers who presumably should be the best informed. That's the FSA educational problem (although Illinois extension is sharing the burden, apparently). [Updated link]
  
• an observation about the intra-state differences in climate in ND, which makes the program work better for some farmers than others.
  

Sec. 1619 in Kansas

Yes, we're in Kansas, via EWG.org, and the Salina paper has a long article on the problems the Sec. 1619 restriction causes for assessors.

Bypassing Bureaucratic Rules--NYPD

The Post's Book World carries a review of a book on the NY Police Department. In an example of entrepreneurship (yes, bureaucrats can be entrepreneurs just as capitalists can), it's set up a counter-intelligence shop:

Freed from the bureaucratic restraints of Washington, Cohen [ex-CIA man heading the shop] set about building his 600-person unit with astonishing speed and efficiency, infuriating former federal colleagues along the way. In no time, he had twice as many fluent Arabic speakers on his staff as in the entire Federal Bureau of Investigation. His agents speak some 50 languages and dialects in all, which matches the reported linguistic capabilities of the Central Intelligence Agency.

The book is: SECURING THE CITY Inside America's Best Counterterror Force -- the NYPD By Christopher Dickey.

But there's also this:

"Dickey might have dug a little deeper in addressing the persistent but vague allegations in Washington that the NYPD counterterrorism unit cuts legal corners and that some of its methods are unconstitutional. "They do stuff that would get us arrested," says one three-letter guy."

Our Missing History

Read Fred Kaplan on the chasms in our federal archives. The one problem with his piece is he's citing a National Archives study from 2005, not 2008. So when it says the National Archives can't accept Powerpoint, it's probably obsolete information. But still scary (since Condi Rice was denied access to Rumsfeld's Powerpoint presentation pre-Iraq war, showing how key such things are).

One's Belief in Reason Suffers

From a Consumer Reports piece [subscription probably required--emphasis added] on finances:

Retirement-planning strategies encourage investors to diversify beyond safe vehicles such as bonds and CDs. Our respondents who had planned were less conservative, in general, than those who hadn't. Before the meltdown, that approach benefited them, according to our 2007 survey. But it proved punishing during the unusually severe market downturn of recent months. So pre-retirees who had done more planning reported worse losses, on average, than those who hadn't planned.

Those Bureaucratic Rules Snag TARP Oversight

Armit Paley in the Post reports that an instrument of good government reformer-types, the Paperwork Reduction Act, is slowing efforts to oversee the use of the TARP (Troubled Assets Relief Program) money. The good Senator Grassley attacks OMB for its "red tape".

(I'm assuming the reference is to the requirement that OMB approve all requests for data from 10 or more members of the public--that's the "OMB number" in the upper right corner of most forms the public will see. Usually takes a while for OMB to approve an agency's proposed request, because people like the good Senator Grassley attack bureaucrats who want needlessly to bother good hard working citizens with silly requests for information.)

New Trees for Old?

The NYTimes has an article on the spread of "rain forests". Yes, I wrote spread. It seems the phenomena of abandoned farms/plantations reverting to the "wild" isn't limited to the Northeast. (I've some nice photos which show a big change in the landscape where I grew up over 80 years or so--but that's a project for another day.)

I've put the quotes in because there seems to be controversy among the scientists over whether the reforested land is of much ecological or environmental value. The article is also unclear, as here: "In Panama by the 1990s, the last decade for which data is available, the rain forest is being destroyed at a rate of 1.3 percent each year. The area of secondary forest is increasing by more than 4 percent yearly, Dr. Wright estimates." No way to know whether the percentages are off the same base--the way the sentence is worded one would assume not, but then the point of it is lost.

The earlier part of the same paragraph:

"About 38 million acres of original rain forest are being cut down every year, but in 2005, according to the most recent “State of the World’s Forests Report” by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, there were an estimated 2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing in the tropics — an area almost as large as the United States. The new forest included secondary forest on former farmland and so-called degraded forest, land that has been partly logged or destroyed by natural disasters like fires and then left to nature."

The point is, the world is more complex than the protagonists on any side usually admit. As a bonus, here's chapter 2 of a book which tries to display visually how U.S. agriculture has changed, with the prime farming areas moving West. (The upstate NY area from Albany to Buffalo has dramatically changed in this regard.) The focus of the chapter is more on prime farmland shifting to urban uses, but what was prime in 1820 is now forest.

Blogging Secretaries

The TSA (Transportation Security Admin) has a blog, and they just referenced their Secretary's blog. I'm not terribly impressed by the content, but it's a step. Presumably she has some staffer who really does the writing, said staffer also being the one who will see the comments about E-Verify (checking ID's of new employees to scare off illegal immigrants).

Maybe Secretary Vilsack and the new head of FSA, whoever she is, will do their own blogs?