What Should Dems Do?

(About health care reform). Damned if I know.  Just two comments:

• it's a true fact, I believe, the House could decide to take up the Senate bill anytime between now and adjournment sine die.  So any decision now is not necessarily final.
• all the bluster by liberals on blogs like TPM Cafe about supporting primary opponents against such people as Barney Frank is only proof there's some idiots on the left to balance the idiots on the right. (I remember the problems pushing meaningful civil rights legislation in the 50's and early 60's.)
  

Don't Drive and Use Personal Electronics (While in a War Zone)

Tom Ricks has a post.  It's probably a good reminder that most of war is incredibly boring.

Brown for President

I want to be one of the first to plug our new Senator from Massachusetts as a candidate for President.  His background and experience will be almost as good as Obama's when he ran, he's as good looking and equally impressive in the pecs, has an attractive family with 2 daughters and a professional wife, and an unlikely personal narrative.

What more can America want?  Brown for President in 2012.

Lefties Originate in the Stars?

My father was left-handed, which meant when we went out to eat (about 3-4 times a year at most), he needed to be seated in the proper place so as not to bump others.  Maybe that made me more interested in the book: Right Hand, Left Hand which takes the apparently simple issue of handedness, and traces it into history (how did societies agree on driving on the right or left) and physics (how do we define handedness, well you need to define north and south, and then you get into stars and galaxies) and chemistry (right handed and left handed molecules--but on earth biology has its preference).  Now there's a theory to explain the preference, not that I understand it (the galaxy formed in circularly polarized light), but anyone interested can go there..

Haiti, a Language Island?

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution has been blogging extensively about Haiti, including discussion of possible reasons why Haiti is so poor. 

I wonder if language contributes to it.  Here's my logic:

• Haiti is almost the only French-speaking nation in the Western Hemisphere.  (Martinique is a part of France, Quebec is a part of Canada.)
• Networks of communication and trade are very important in the development of economies. (Assumption)
• Communication is easier when there's a shared language and harder when there isn't one.
• So over the centuries Haitian people have been at a slight disadvantage in dealing with their potential trading partners in other areas, simply because of language. Over time, that disadvantage could add up.

Meanwhile, over the years the people of the Dominican Republic or the Caribbean nations had no communication difficulties with their neighbors, so they could make deals and share ideas.

German Health Care

Another chapter on health care from the T.R.Reid, this time on Germany.  Factoids:

• German doctors are also unionized
• Germany also uses smart cards for health care data
• Bismarck was the father of social insurance.
• So-called "civil society", the nongovernmental groups have always been big in German culture and society, and that's the way the insurance is worked, through your group affiliations.

The Persistence of Silos

Back in the day of ASCS and FmHA (i.e., pre 1994, Agricultural Stabilization and Stabilization Service and Farmers Home Administration), each agency had its own association of county employees.  Come the reorganization which merged the loan function with ASCS into FSA and one might expect a merger of the two associations in maybe 2 or 3 years. 

One might, but one would be disappointed. 

Going on 16 years later, the two associations aren't merged.  Not only that, but the NASCOE website doesn't   recognize the other. See National Association of Credit Specialists and the National Association of FSA County Office Employees. Oh, and there's also the National Association of Support Employees of the Farm Service Agency.

A Failure of Understanding?

In an oldish article on Grist, Debbie Barker writes:

It’s an industry-generated myth that ecologically-safe organic agriculture yields less than conventional agriculture. In fact, a comprehensive study comparing 293 crops from industrial and organic growers demonstrates that organic farm yields are roughly comparable to industrial farms in developed countries; and result in much higher yields in the developing world.

But this says

The performance of organic agriculture on production depends on the previous agricultural management system. An over-simplification of the impact of conversion to organic agriculture on yields indicates that:

• In industrial countries, organic systems decrease yields; the range depends on the intensity of external input use before conversion;
• In the so-called Green Revolution areas (irrigated lands), conversion to organic agriculture usually leads to almost identical yields;
• In traditional rain-fed agriculture (with low-input external inputs), organic agriculture has the potential to increase yields.

To be fair, the FAO says: organic agriculture has the potential to feed the world, under the right circumstances.

My point: "decrease yields" is not the same as "roughly comparable"

Stunt Vegetables?

Obamafoodorama has a  couple posts on a small tempest--it seems Food Network had some sort of cooking challenge between teams of chefs who supposedly were cooking with vegetables from the White House garden.  Except that the show taped the vegetables being harvested one week and being cooked a week later, so it was revealed the actual vegetables cooked weren't the actual vegetables grown in the actual soil of the White House grounds.  Unless and until someone shows the White House has stretched the truth on the kind and volume of harvests from the garden, this strikes me as a non-issue, but it does yield the nice term "stunt vegetables".

The Disaster Learning Curve

If we have enough disasters, we may learn, but we're still low on the curve, coordination-wise:

Technology Review and the Clinton/Bush site point to this site. It 's GIS based with different data layers.

Google has a People finder site and the two ought to be at least cross-linked.





And of course the Red Cross is doing its thing.

As a side note, I see Dan Snyder's private plane was reportedly being use to convey people to Haiti--don't know if it was one of the planes which the FAA had to order back because there was no traffic control at Port-au-Prince and no fuel on the ground. 

Bottomline, everyone likes to rush into action, it will take some more disasters to climb a bit further up the curve.