Iraq Needed Bureaucrats

There was a C-Span broadcast yesterday of a hearing by an Iraq/Afghanistan contracting commission with the IG, Mr. Bowen and staff., tied to the book: "Hard Lessons". One of the interesting questions, perhaps from the former comptroller of the Pentagon, was about "absorptive capacity", whether Iraq had the bureaucratic infrastructure to absorb the $18 billion, or $25 billion, or whatever amounts were targeted for the country. Bowen said: "no", maybe $5 billion. Point--you need bureaucrats, you need a banking system (which Iraq didn't have, so they hauled cash around), in order to spend money.

But What About Battleaxe?

Good news for the animal lovers among us--British researchers find that cows with names give more milk. (Hat Tip: Freakonomics). It's the sort of warm idea which pleases everyone--images of farmers stroking the cow's nose, before sitting down to milk her. Actually, I suspect it's an artifact: dairies with lots of cows can't give names, dairies with few cows can. And the only way a small dairy can survive is to pick the most productive cows.

Then again, sometimes animals earn names. (I wonder whether the piglets in this story got named, other than the expletives I'm sure Stonehead surpressed in writing it.) Which all reminds me of a cow we had named "Battleaxe". As one might expect, she didn't have a pleasant personality, nor was she particularly productive, but dad endured her for a few years, years which saw him educate his son in profanity.

Football Players Are Too Big

Parts of last night's Superbowl were great. But I took a look at the rosters for each team--if I'm right there was only one lineman who weighed less than 300 pounds. That's a lot.

How about imposing a team weight limit--say set the cap at 95 percent of the weight of the average NFL team? Then you'd have judgment calls--do you keep your 350 pound nose tackle and cut your 280 pound middle linebacker or vice versa?

Just a thought. (The Ivy schools have a lightweight football league.)

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.