The Litigious American

This Business Week article says claims from all 50 states confront Kenneth Feinberg, the BP claim administrator. Tocqueville was right.

The Foodies Case Against Dairy

Some foodies have a problem with the dairy industry, but at least they don't lie about aborted dairy calves.

I do question this statement: "The average milking cow is about four when she’s considered “spent” in industry terms."  Amazingly enough a quick Google doesn't reveal an authoritative answer. Nor do I trust wikipedia on this.  I think this piece accurately reflects the dairyperson's thoughts, particularly the smaller one who is growing her own replacements.  In other words, the answer to the question "when does the dairy cow go to slaughter" is: "it all depends".

Props to GW Again

Seems every 6 months or so something comes up where I have to recognize our former President and his accomplishments.  This time it's his approach to Islam after 9/11.  See this Politico piece by Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman on the way the GOP is abandoning his stand and, as titled, GOP takes harsher stand on Islam.

Resolving the Mosque Issue

Seems to me at bottom the controversy over the community center/mosque planned for lower Manhattan is a NIMBY (not in my backyard) issue.  Everyone agrees the group has the legal right to build 2 blocks from the World Trade Center site; it's just some like the ADL and some conservatives don't think it's a good place. In this light there are a couple ways to resolve it, methods which apply whenever NIMBYism raises its head. Of course, since I'm a liberal, they involve using governmental authority:

• use zoning laws to specify that no religious building shall be built within x miles of the WTC site, grandfathering in the existing churches. (It wouldn't be legal to specify no mosques.)
• use eminent doman to buy all the property within x miles of the WTC site, so the land become government owned, just like the Flight 93 memorial in Shanksville.  Of course, the cost would be high.  If the public is willing to pay the price, and not spend the money on other uses, then they can have a buffer zone.

[Updated:  You could also do a "legislative taking", which is what Congress did for some Manassas battleground land back in the day.

Finally, I like Dan Drezner's comments.]

Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth

Via Tyler Cowen, German plutocrats look unkindly on poor old Bill Gates and his crusade to have billionaires give away half their income.

From the interview:

In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.
SPIEGEL: Do the donations also have to do with the fact that the idea of state and society is such different one in the United States?

Krämer: Yes, one cannot forget that the US has a desolate social system and that alone is reason enough that donations are already a part of everyday life there. But it would have been a greater deed on the part of Mr. Gates or Mr. Buffet if they had given the money to small communities in the US so that they can fulfil public duties.

Animal Welfare

The Times had an article (8/12) on animal welfare, focused on the agreement in Ohio between the Humane Society and the farmers.

Robin Hanson has a post  which includes a long quote on a survey of philosophers.  This sentence is striking:

Fully 81% of female philosophers born in 1960 or later said it was morally bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals.

 As John Phipps has said, I think the trend is slowly to define eating mammals as bad, just as it's now been defined that eating white bread is bad and whole wheat is good.

Limits on the Size of Farms?

Agweb has an interesting discussion of the size of farms. The argument is that one person can manage up to 10 employees, which is about enough to handle 10,000 acres.  (I'm assuming we're talking grain or cotton crops here as I imagine produce or livestock would have a different scale.)  Any more and you're talking a real organization, where the top person is managing managers. 

I guess one could grant the title "family farm" to such farms--after all back in the 1870 census my great grandfather had a hired hand living in household and he only had 300+ acres.  But that's stretching it--I'm too lazy today to see what ERS says about farms where most of the labor is hired.

Congressionally Required Reports

Somewhere back in the dark ages there was some agreement between the executive branch and Congress on Congressionally required reports.  I forget whether it was USDA and the Ag committees, or the President and Congress.

This Project on Government Oversight post describes a bill in Congress to put all such reports online.

I'd love to see a study of these reports.  I suspect in many cases they are a sop thrown to assuage someone's pet concerns.  A Congressperson has a bee in their bonnet, or some interest group is pestering them, so instead of enacting some legislation everyone agrees on requiring the bureaucracy to submit a report.  By the time the report is completed and submitted, the bee is dead, the pesterers are disbanded or moved to something else, so the report gathers dust, unread, but having served its function in the great and glorious American political system. The only cost was the waste of a bureaucrat's time, and we all know that's not important.

Sometimes, and more perniciously, the requirement is for a periodic report.  I say more perniciously because it eats up time every year.  At least it does if the bureaucrats honor the requirement.  That doesn't always happen, because like kids suspecting a "beware the dog" sign is a bluff, bureaucrats may decide to do their business, guessing Congress will never notice the omitted report.

Some Congressionally-required reports are worthwhile--like the State Department's reports on terrorist states but I doubt the need for most.

Open Government at Agriculture

USDA ranks towards the bottom, meeting only 6 of 10 criteria.

I'm Wrong About Google Searching

One thing I realized this week--I've been wrong about using Google to search. 

Background:  I've been impatient with bureaucracies, particularly governmental, which design their own search facilities.  I think I've said on this blog a time or two that people should just use Google. 

Why am I wrong?  Well, Google at the base is using links to prioritize its results.  So, if we're talking about a collection of documents, say Federal Register documents or FSA handbooks, which don't have internal links, it would seem Google would do a lousy job of searching them.

Now I've made that admission, I'm done admitting errors for the year.