Policy on Iran

I don't usually comment on foreign policy but some have criticized Obama for keeping hands off Iran--not declaring a favorite. I understand, but I also remember in Venezuela, relatively early in the Bush administration, it looked for a few days as if Chavez would be ousted. The Bush people applauded the apparent result, and Chavez has never forgotten it. Sometimes it's right to push for change, sometimes not, and you never know for sure which is which.

The Poor and Food

An item in the Post this morning and the sight of a sale on canned tomatoes reminds me of a fact, or a series of facts, interlinked. Stereotypically the grocery stores in poorer urban neighborhoods are small and pricey. The urban poor typically do not have cars, being more reliant on public transport. (Even in Reston I often see people walking from the local Safeway to the once-subsidized housing complex carrying a couple bags of groceries.) The poor live from month to month. All of which makes it difficult to take advantage of sales at stores, to invest money in food which you may eat in 6 months, rather than 6 hours.

My wife and I will stock up on canned tomatoes on our weekly shopping trip, and thereby save about 40 percent on the cost. It's easy because we have the money, we have the car (I normally walk except for the weekly trip), and the store is handy. It's taking advantage of an opportunity (which we can do on other staples), not a determined effort to limit food expenditures to a budget figure, but it does mean our food costs are lower than for a poorer couple in different circumstances.

Inquiring Gardeners Want to Know: Mulch or Weed?

The White House garden got a splash of publicity yesterday, as the kids from the school harvested and ate a lot of stuff. It's a good time to deplete the lettuce; it's likely to bolt when hot weather hits. And the peas should be about at the peak. The cucumbers must be just starting to bear. We have problems with them--hope Michelle doesn't.

But in all the publicity and the photos I haven't seen the answer to one big question: are the gardeners using mulch to keep down the weeds, or are they just hand weeding? Mulch would be the preferred organic solution, but getting down on hands and knees and weeding works too.

Land Tenure

I've become quite aware of land tenure issues since my cousin got me more interested in Irish history. So while my great grandfather's family were tenants in County Down, with little or no chance to buy land because it was all owned by the large English landowners, once he got to the US and was ready to settle in frontier Illinois, he could assemble 300+ acres, a figure that would have put him in the top 1 percent in Ireland.

There's variations in the U.S.;in the East and South, land was sold often by the warrant system, meaning the survey came after settlement, rather than before, so you don't have the township/range system, the Southwest still bears the marks of Spanish/Mexican land system; the Native American tribes have different land tenures depending on how the Dawes Act affected them. And in the nation of Palau you see the ultimate in land tenure entanglements.

Bureaucratic Inertia in Schools

Via Kevin Drum, a report on charter schools:

At present there appears to be an authorizing crisis in the charter school sector. For a number of reasons — many of them understandable — authorizers find it difficult to close poorly performing schools. Despite low test scores, failing charter schools often have powerful and persuasive supporters in their communities who feel strongly that shutting down this school does not serve the best interests of currently enrolled students. Evidence of financial insolvency or corrupt governance structure, less easy to dispute or defend, is much more likely to lead to school closures than poor academic performance. And yet, as this report demonstrates, the apparent reluctance of authorizers to close underperforming charters ultimately reflects poorly on charter schools as a whole. More importantly, it hurts students.

Seems to me this shows the same human tendency to value the known and keep to the familiar as we see elsewhere, whether in USDA or GM. (The report is good--done by Stanford, though not pleasant for charter supporters.)

Patient Health Records and HIPAA

The Obama administration is all for electronic health records. Here's a Federal Computer Week article on the topic. It makes sense to me--I'm in Kaiser Permanente which does have its own system, which is much better than the records systems I've run into in my contacts with non-Kaiser setups. (Though that may change when I'm hospitalized.)

One of the aspects I haven't seen discussed is the issue of the caregiver. We're all getting older and we are caring for relatives who are even older and possibly more senile. But under HIPAA, access to someone else's records is severely limited. Essentially, even if you're next of kin you need a health care proxy to access records, including on-line records. I wonder how well computerized systems will handle that issue, because they tend to be designed and built with the idea of the patient handling his/her own data. And the problem is, even the best of us, like me, shy away from either executing his own health care proxy or asking older relatives for theirs. Just one more thing to worry about, and procrastinate on.

Rock Snot Is Spreading

That's the word in a NYTimes science article--apparently fishermen spread it on their waders, even including to New Zealand. The lede:

The Esopus Creek, a legendary Catskill Mountain fly fishing stream that is an integral part of New York City’s vast upstate drinking water system, is one of the latest bodies of water to be infected with Didymosphenia geminata, a fast-spreading single-cell algae that is better known to fishermen and biologists around the world as rock snot

Maybe as I get old and senile I get more enjoyment out of names: first karnal bunt, now rock snot?

Lies

Just caught our President in a lie--Lehrer Newshour was excerpting his remarks to the AMA, the part where he says he, Michelle, and the daughters are like the rest of America, just doing what the doctors tell them to.

What's the lie? He didn't follow doctor's orders to stop smoking. (I had a 2-3 pack a day habit, but I quit before I reached the big 4-0.)

Indian Agriculture

The greens love to cite India as a place where traditional farmers are under siege, where the green revolution has failed, and where unrest is common. For those with time I recommend some of the articles at this site, which give a somewhat different perspective on the state of Indian agriculture. This lead from February is noteworthy:

Mounting stockpiles may prompt the govt to lift a 3-year ban on exports of wheat, likely weighing on prices that have declined 52% the past year in Chicago

Funniest Regulation Title

"Records Governing Off-the-Record Communications. "

(The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is basically saying any communication on a regulatory matter has to be put on the record, even if it's oral and "off-the-record".)