Numbers for Today

An assortment of numbers which struck me:

41--the number of deaths in Iraq among the combat forces, though most were non-combat
78 percent--the number of NFL players who are bankrupt or in financial difficulties 2 years after leaving the league
37--the number of Shakespearean plays Sen. Byrd quoted in his speeches on the floor of the Senate in 1994.

4th--the day of July.

The Alpha and Omega of Bureaucracy

The Post today had pieces showing the alpha and omega of bureaucracy:
Ezra Klein discusses the need for "creative bureaucrats" (my term, not his) to write the regulations for health care reform and financial reform.  Getting the system right up front is critical to success or failure. He writes:

Both bills require the creation of institutions, such as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the state health insurance exchanges. And both require existing agencies, like the Federal Reserve and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, to take on much larger roles. All of this tends to play poorly politically, with naysayers worrying about unelected bureaucrats making important decisions behind closed doors. But in some ways, the greater danger is that the doors will be open and the wrong people will walk through

Peter Carlson has a piece from the other end of the bureaucracy: the "operator", the person who has to apply the rules and regulations in face to face dealings with the (in this case) American public as a census worker.  He had to contact people who failed to mail back their form.  His account, including the creation of two new races (Armenian-Irish and Irish-Peruvian) shows the reality behind government statistics, as well as being a reflection of where we are in the great melting pot.

Soft on Crime--Republican Justices?

  From the Scotus Blog (hat tip Volokh Conspiracy),  counter-intuitive sentences, though I don't intend to revive the "soft on crime" political slur, regardless of to whom it is applied:

"But it is easy to overlook that their principled reading of other provisions regularly leads Scalia and Thomas to adopt the very most defendant-favoring positions on the Court.  In previous Terms, Scalia and Thomas have been a part of the majority revolutionizing both sentencing and the right of confrontation, which favor criminal defendants."

Pigford Update

The Pigford money has been having a hard time making it through Congress because it's attached to legislation the Reps and Dems are fighting over.  But there was a switch to a plan B which may help, described here.

But this quote from John Boyd puzzles me:

"Boyd also called on southern Republican senators to "do the right thing for the black farmers" who are their constituents and vote for it. He noted that Mississippi and Alabama each has about 20,000 black farmers who would get settlements."

I don't see anything in this which supports his figures, though he may be thinking of people who would/have applied and not the "black principal operator"  ERS uses.  Mr. Boyd should also note that (20,000 + 20,000) * $50,000 = $2,000,000,000, which is more than is available and more than is agreed to in the recent negotiations.

Those Tough French Schools--Factoid of the Day

Via Mr. Beauregarde:
"40% of French school kids up to the age of fifteen have repeated a year at some stage in their éducation."

And, within living memory, French kids used to go to school on Saturday.

NRCS and FSA--Testimony from FSA

I quote from a legislative statement dated today, the testimony of Mr. Lohr:

Both FSA and NRCS are in the process of upgrading their technology and business processes, FSA through the Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems (MIDAS) project and NRCS through the Conservation Delivery Streamlining Initiative. Having FSA administer conservation programs would go a long way towards assisting NRCS in reaching its Streamlining Initiative goals of reducing field staff administrative workloads by 80%. It would also enable their field staff to reach the goal of spending 75% of their time in the field providing conservation assistance to farmers and ranchers. NRCS has indicated concern with the administrative burden on field office technical staff from expanded roles for contract development and management. NRCS’s Streamlining Initiative encourages a move to a “natural resource centric view” concentrating on identifying and solving resource problems and moving away from a “financial assistance centric view.”

The NRCS Streamlining Initiative highlighted as one of its top objectives the implementation of programs through alternative staffing and delivery approaches designed around more efficient business processes to minimize the non-technical workload on field staff.

Now is the time to make the IT changes to enhance FSA’s administrative and NRCS’s technical capabilities .For example, FSA and NRCS use different GIS software programs, ArcGIS and Toolkit, respectively. This is not practical. It is extremely inefficient to develop and maintain two USDA systems to administer farm and conservation programs. We can no longer afford these inefficiencies.

The third from the last sentence surprises me.  So much for the work of Kevin Wickey.

What Does Extension Do?

Here's an article on the shift of an extension director over to FSA, which provides some information on what extension actually does, at least in Iowa.

A Bit of History

Brad DeLong has been running a series of posts related to WWII.  Here he quotes Neville Chamberlain's speech when Germany invaded Czechoslovakia.  I found this sentence striking:

"Every man and woman in this country who remembers the fate of the Jews and the political prisoners in Austria must be filled today with distress and foreboding."

McArdle and Normalizing Children

Megan McArdle is back from her honeymoon and worrying about normalizing children: human interventions to adjust the height, and other characteristics, of our children.  As a very tall woman, she tentatively plumps for normalizing:

"If I were presented with a virtually riskless way to let my daughters buy clothing off the rack, and blend into the classroom a little better?  Frankly, no child of mine is ever going to have a brilliant athletic future in front of her.  So why not?  I'm pretty sure she could fight the patriarchy just as easily without a 35 inch inseam."

I'm bugged by the middle sentence and would have commented but I come late to the party so I'll post here instead:

• she does not allow for the genetics her daughter will receive from her husband.  He may be a total klutz, but maybe not.
• even if neither parent contributes much in the way of coordination, I'm reading the sentence, perhaps wrongly, as saying Ms McArdle looks down on athletics, at least as it pertains to her and hers. I'm hearing in it an echo of the attitude I get from some older relatives of mine: I'm no good on computers and technical type stuff.  That drives me up the wall. Now if they'd say: the world is full of wondrous things and my time on the planet is limited, so I choose not to invest the time needed to learn the ins and outs of Windows and the Internet--that I could understand.  
• so I guess I'd wish McArdle to say: while I'm not good at athletics, I'll try to keep my daughter's eyes open to athletics, just as I keep them open to a possible career in nuclear physics.

Balls and Strikes

Andrew Pincus at TPM reports on an exchange with Ms. Kagan on the famous Roberts definition of a judge's role: call balls and strikes.  I'm disappointed she didn't go further with the metaphor.  Anyone who grew up when I did was told the strike zone was between the knees and the armpits, and over the plate.  Anyone who watches baseball on TV today knows that's not the way umpires see it today.  And there's no consistency from umpire to umpire.  The best the pitcher and the batters can hope for is consistency through the day.