The Commentariat Lose Weight

Matt Yglesias posts that he lost 50-70 pounds last year.  Ta-Nahesi Coates lost about the same amount in the same time.  Do two pundits make a trend?

Love This Conjunction

An MSNBC article on people who can't go with other people near, ends this way:

"Shy bladder is a real disorder," says Soifer, "not something to be snickered about or laughed at."
Want more weird [emphasis added] health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

First Tomato of the Year

Harvested our first tomato of the year.  Unfortunately it wasn't perfect, it'd split and something, maybe birds, had been at the flesh, but we got 3/4 of it.  Tasted great.  Today is also the day the NYTimes reviews the book on Florida tomatoes. The reviewer liked it. I suspect I'll have reservations.  July 6 to maybe Oct 15 marks the outer limits of our garden tomatoes.  For the rest of the year we have to rely on hothouse tomatoes or tomatoes which have to travel, meaning they lose some flavor.  There's always a tradeoff.

Takes the Bureaucracy a While to Catch Up

Politico runs a story saying the online application for marriage licenses in NYCity still said "groom" and "bride".  It was quickly changed.

I hate to think of all the forms and processes and databases which are going to have to be changed to handle same-sex marriage.  I can predict with great confidence there will still be "husband/wife" blocks and fields existing long after I'm dead, maybe still in 2040.

Post and Times Agree on Immigration: It's Down

They don't agree on why--according to the Post things are so terrible in Mexico potential immigrants from Central America are scared off and don't cross Mexico into the US; according to the Times things are so great in Mexico potential immigrants decide to enjoy the good life in Mexico.

They aren't exactly in conflict, but two sides of a many sided coin.

The French Do It Too

What's "it"?  Tinker with bureaucratic tricks to help, or seem to help, their farmers.  A quote from Farm Policy, emphasis on the last clause:

“The French government has, to its credit, been responsive to the problem. The state-owned railway operator, SNCF, is subsidizing the transport of cattle feed, the country’s banks are helping with solvency concerns by giving borrowers some leeway, insurance companies are postponing client payments until the situation improves, and the government has just injected €800 million ($1,162 billion) in funds into the agricultural economy, bringing the 2011 single farm payment forward.”

Back in 1981 the farm economy was tanking. One of the methods Congress and the administration used to help was to make advance deficiency payments, issuing the money before we knew what the actual payment rate would be.  Unfortunately, as is the rule with Congress, a one-time expedient often turns into a permanent tactic.  Having shown ASCS (as FSA was then) could handle making advance payments (at least we didn't wholly screw the pooch to quote "The Right Stuff"), they then made that a regular provision, first of deficiency payments then of direct payments.  The tradeoff, because there's no such thing as a free lunch, is that administrative costs went up, because some portion of the advances were unearned, either because of individual faults or unforeseen disasters which changed the average market prices, meaning we had to try to collect the money back.

Why Americans Don't Like Bureaucrats

Because we fought a revolution against them--one of our grievances against George III:

" He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."

Happy Fourth of July

The Art of the Knife, in Academic Life

Dan Drezner was an early blogger and was also refused tenure at the University of Chicago, two facts which may or may not have been related.  He and his wife write about the denial 5 years later here.  Dan's essay ends thusly:

I don't know if the University of Chicago's department of political science would change its mind if it could go back in time. It has moved on and will no doubt soon reclaim its historical status as a great place for international relations. I have moved on as well.

Somehow the penultimate sentence casts some doubt on the ultimate one.

Great Bureaucrat: Montgomery Meigs

A rare celebration of a noted bureaucrat in the Washington Post magazine.  The bureaucrat? General Montgomery Meigs, who had a number of accomplishments, including building the acqueduct which still supplies water to the District, builder of the Pension Building, quartermaster general during the Civil War, savior of Fort Pickens in Pensacola Bay upon outbreak of the Civil War, builder of the Capitol Dome. 

The Architect and the Master Bureaucrat

Lots of people attack bureaucracy along the lines of James Scott's "Seeing Like a State", arguing that a master plan, or "scheme" as the Brits would say, is always suspect because it takes no account of local knowledge and local realities.  That line of attack can be persuasive; I'm sometimes tempted to buy it and turn in my liberal's stripes.

But then I read a post like Walter Jeffries and my temptation fades away, which is rather ironic because Walter is a fervent opponent of big bureaucracy and bureaucratic schemes like NAIS (for identifying farm animals). Walter and his family have a farm in Vermont, very energy-efficient. For maybe the last 12-16 months they've been actively engaged in building a butcher shop.  They've got the foundation and walls up, with lots of work yet to go.  Walt's post lists all the complicated factors he has to take into account, ending with the fact that all his design work will end up in concrete so he can't afford a mistake.

Now building a butcher shop is complex, but not nearly as complex as building say the Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan, or any other large building or development.  But we expect architects and building engineers to be able to pull it off, and they do, normally.  So too I expect Walter to pull it off.  The success of architects and Walter renews my faith in the idea that human reason and sweat can actually create things which work, things which can include bureaucracies.