Discovered: The Undetectable Extension Charm and Rolling Thunder

Wife and I recently watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I, on DVD in which Hermione's handbag with its inexhaustible contents plays a key role.  Turns out it's because she applied the "Undetectable Extension Charm" to it, making it capable of infinite expansion.

According to this Washington Times article, there were 750,000 motorcycle riders in last year's Rolling Thunder. And this says 500,000 are expected for this years.  Apparently someone will apply the charm to the Pentagon parking lots, which are the staging area for the riders. 

Why do I say this?  Well, lets say 4 motorcycles can fit in the space for one car.  Most of the cycles I see on TV have only one rider, so lets say 500,000 divided by 4 = 125,000 car equivalents, but take off 25,000 to allow for double riders.  Assume that all the people at the Pentagon drive to work with no car pooling (not true--car pooling and subway and bus all serve the building), so there must be 100,000 people working there?

Not so, it's more like 30,000.   Bottom line is, the organizers of all demonstrations in DC claim numbers which are too high, including even the vets, but the media never scrutinize the vets.  That would be politically incorrect.

(Wiki answers says the Pentagon has 8,000 parking spots.)

Capping Crop Insurance Subsidies

Here's the page from the Congressional Record containing the amendment to cap the federal subsidy on crop insurance premiums.  Essentially if the producer is over $750K AGI according to FSA at the beginning of the crop year, the subsidy is whacked 15 points.  The Secretary can waive the requirement.

Though I'm populist and liberal enough to like the concept, there's some issues there.

• Getting congruence between the FSA records and the reinsurance year, given that different crops have different dates and different terms.
• Getting congruence between FSA "producers" and FCIC "insureds" (though that may be a problem which RMA and FSA have already worked out.
• the tipping point.  If a producer goes over AGI by one dollar, he may lose much more in subsidy

[Rural Blog on the amendment.]

FCIC, Fraud, and Pigford

Sen. Hagan of NC got an amendment to the farm bill passed, allowing some use of the crop insurance fund to look for fraud.  Her actions were inspired by the biggest crop insurance fraud yet discovered, located in eastern NC. (Not sure whether it was the biggest in money terms ($100 million), or in the numbers of people involved.  .  I was led to these articles:

• biggest crop insurance fraud
• Stokes

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think this is a reminder that fraud is an equal opportunity temptation.  Also a reminder that whenever there's a new program, or a steep increase in an old program, the incentive to defraud is raised, and bureaucrats would be well advised to increase their counter-measures.  

Pigford Lawyers Hire Lobbyists

That's the report from Politico.

John Boyd is not happy, asking very reasonably IMHO why they need lobbyists now? 

Seems to me both the Pigford I and II settlements are over, all except the shouting.  There might be a need for lobbyists in case a House committee wants to look into the role of the lawyers in crafting and administering the settlement.  But who can say?

VA, DOD, and Me

Though I'm a veteran, I've stayed away from the VA, not much there for me.

But I've watched with interest through the years, particularly in the pages of the Washington Monthly, as the VA has worked on incorporating computers into their health record system, then later as the DOD and VA have tried and failed, so far, to come up with one health record system which will follow the military person from active duty to the VA hospital to the grave.

In skimming the papers this morning I note DOD Secretary Hagel was getting flak for wanting to study the issue further, someone in Congress said we needed not VA and DOD systems which could interoperate but one system.  Though my bias has always been towards one system, as I've aged I wonder whether that's right.  In my USDA days with Infoshare we were trying to build one system which could serve at least ASCS, FmHA, SCS, and possibly FCIC and Extension.  Needless to say we failed.  The best I understand these days MIDAS is an FSA initiative, with little or no carryover to NRCS, and none to RD.

Maybe back in the day we would have been better off just focusing on file transfers of data, use more brute force and keep interconnections looser rather than tighter.  Certainly with DOD and VA they've spent years and millions and failed.  I don't know.

Our Ante-bellum Government

Stumbled on an interesting publication from Ohio, written by the auditor, called "Ohio Lands Book".

Seems the federal government was active in the subsidizing of:

• public schools
• canals
• railroads
• ministers (apparently uniquely, Congress designated something over 40,000 acres for supporting religion)
• salt springs
• swamplands
• specific grants to colleges (i.e., preceding the Morrill Land Grant Act.)

[updated to insert "acres]

Oh For the Days of "No Cost" Tobacco

Once upon a time long ago there was great outrage when people discovered the government (ASCS) was doing tobacco price support (and marketing quota) programs at the same time the Surgeon General was saying smoking was bad. 

After sufficient pontificating on the Hill, legislation was passed which tried to make the tobacco program "no cost"--that is, the costs of the program were borne by the tobacco industry, at least in theory--some dispute over the accounting for administrative functions. 

That was a while ago, and the meme about USDA supporting tobacco had dwindled almost to nothing.  Dwindled at least until today, when some Senators have discovered that RMA/FCIC subsidizes crop insurance for tobacco and are hoping to amend the farm bill to prohibit that.

All cynicism aside, I can't disagree with them.  When pot is legalized, I would firmly oppose offering crop insurance for it.

Early Playing: Baseball Factoids

Ran across two factoids today:

Mr. Cabrera is on the list of people who hit the most homers by the time they were 30.   What's sort of surprising is two of the people started their major league careers at 17 (Mel Ott and  Jimmie Foxx)  And two of the three top hitters aren't on the list of 12 top hitters at all: Babe Ruth (started off pitching) and Barry Bonds (started off clean). Hat Tip owed, perhaps to Powerline.

And the Texans, who are always biggest, best and first, also were playing baseball before the Civil War, and during.

Maid's Quarters: $1.5 Millon

And that's the low-end.  If you want your maid to have good quarters, you can spend $3.5 million.

But your wine can be housed for a mere $158,000.

All of this from this graphic in the NYTimes, accompanying an article about the tallest residential building in NYC, now under construction, many of the apartments of which are sold, some to wealthy foreigners.

John Kenneth Galbraith used to have great fun poking at apparent excesses like this; not sure we have anyone like that today.

Use Proportional Spaced Type, Please

The White House released the emails about Benghazi, and Kevin Drum has excerpts.

I'm back on my hobbyhorse: for once and for all, proportional spaced type is more legible than the old monospaced pica and elite type, familiar to some of us from the SmithCorona/Remington days. So why Gen. Petraeus and the NCTC are using monospaced only shows how backward some in the intelligence/foreign affairs community are.  Get with the program, join the 21st century.