Sometimes You Can't Win

The CourierPress (KY) has a piece on a long conflict between FSA and a black farmer over farm loans. The latest episode has the man arrested for his words on a phone call, which were interpreted as a threat. As he's 82, it seems to have been overreaction. On the other hand, how much strength does it take to pull a trigger?

One doesn't know the rights and wrongs of the case, though there's lots of comments on the article, most of which assume some misaction on the part of the government. Of course, the infamous $60 million lawsuit in DC over the missing pants from the drycleaners is a reminder that not all suits are well-founded.

Poor Walt Whitman

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries quotes a piece on a protest of Walt, at the school named in his honor. The protestors were from Topeka, KS. They think he doesn't deserve a school.

Today's Amish Problems

LA Times has a story on the Amish in Indiana--many are off the farm due to high land prices and high population, pushing them into the system. Now some are laid off, and collecting unemployment.

The Amish have adapted to economic crises before. During the Depression, some men were permitted to register for driver's licenses, according to research by Nolt. That special exemption is less likely to happen this time, the professor said, because the Amish have come to view the horse and buggy as core parts of their identity.

This recession is especially brutal because the Amish factory workers became accustomed to earning annual salaries of $60,000 to $100,000, which provided for mortgages and shopping trips. A fiberglass basketball hoop hangs above a buggy in one driveway. The Wal-Mart has a hitching post. And some Amish men are as attached to their cellphones as their beards.

Prof. Kraybill has observed there's a tension between someone being the leader of an enterprise and boss of a number of employees and the self-effacement that's expected of Amish. Will be interesting to see how this works out over the years.

Slowness Serves as Validation Check

My wife and I had some problems getting our passports through. (A word of advice--never say you have no plans for foreign travel, even when you don't. The system seems to be set up to expect a specific departure date. When I looked up my grandfather's passport application in ancestry.com it showed specific departure date and place. So probably the State Dept. has just carried that forward over the centuries, regardless of the fact that passports are being required for any foreign travel, even Canada and Mexico, these days.)

Anyhow, my problems made me attend to news reports, including this. GAO found they were issuing some passports based on SSN's of dead people (also sounds like FSA's problem in the past). Turns out:

State was experiencing a relative lull in applications in late 2008 after a spike in 2007, Sprague noted. The database check can take a day, which was never an issue when employees faced a backlog of applications in 2007, she said. But when the workload decreased and passport applications could be processed much faster, some specialists and supervisors didn't know to wait for the database check to be completed.

So the interface between State and SSA worked fine as long as State was slow enough. I love it.

Our Ancestors Ruined the Soil

From Farmgate summary, on combating soil compaction: "He says MN researchers have found compaction remaining from 1880’s covered wagons."

Byrd Benevolence and American History

For those interested in the teaching of history, in teaching, period, and in how our government works (which means anyone interested in humans), I recommend this post at History Net. (The context is a discussion of the effectiveness or lack thereof of the money spent on history teaching by the federal government, under a program instigated by Senator Byrd.)

Don't Understand--15 Weeks of CSA?

I clicked on the Borski Farms site via a link from a foodie site. It's an organic farm in Utah, but its CSA shares run only 15 weeks. I guess that must reflect a much shorter growing season in Utah than in VA, but I don't know what Mormon locavores are supposed to do the other 37 weeks of the year?

But the Free Market Depends on Enlightened Self Interest

"it’s almost impossible to overstate the power of the laziness of the bond investor."

That's a quote via Kevin Drum from Felix Salmon discussing economics and risk. Enlightened self-interest implies something other than being a couch potato. That's one problem with the free market economists--they're idealists who see humans as better than we are.

Doug Caruso Has Friends

That's how he become FSA administrator --see Brownfield. (It's true in DC as elsewhere, it's who you know.) He's tight with the head of the House appropriations ag subcommittee and the Senate appropriations ag subcommittee. (That's better than being friends with Peterson and Harkin, the heads of the ag committees--the appropriations people control what's actually done. That's the reason the Ag building is the Jamie Whitten building, named after the longtime House approp man.)

A Good Sentence and a Horrible One--David Brooks

David Brooks had an op-ed on Obama's administration Tuesday with two sentences I want to note:

"If he pulls this mantle [of being the party of order, responsibility and small-town values] away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics...."

"Even F.D.R. decided to concentrate on the banking crisis in his first year and put other issues off until 1934 and beyond. "

The second sentence is simply wrong. FDR proposed a bunch of major legislation during his first hundred days, and didn't do that much legislatively in 1934.