Beware of Innocent Seeming Names

Someone, I suspect on Powerline but I'm not sure, included a link to this site, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.   It seems be an okay organization, but a skeptical eye might note this mission statement:

"Since 1943, AAPS has been dedicated to the highest ethical standards of the Oath of Hippocrates and to preserving the sanctity of the patient-physician relationship and the practice of private medicine."

 The "private" is a give-away, to me at least.  Back in the day the American Medical Association was a pillar of the fight against socialized medicine.  But my suspicion is that they didn't fight strongly enough, so a splinter group founded the AAPS to be more stalwart.

(I swear until I started writing this 10 minutes ago I hadn't checked the wikipedia entry.)

The Art of Persuasion

I don't expect to see Government Executive run an article like this, 
discussing the philosopher Pascal.  He wrote this, as quoted in the article:

"When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. Now, no one is offended at not seeing everything; but one does not like to be mistaken, and that perhaps arises from the fact that man naturally cannot see everything, and that naturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true.

Pascal added:

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others."

Editing Common Land Unit

A QandA from the notes of the NASCOE convention:

": Are there discussions regarding allowing NRCS to edit our CLU layer?
A: Brad Pfaff: Yes those discussions are happening to have NRCS edit the CLU and SCIMS. Darren Ash: They are looking at the impact it could have allowing other agencies to have that type of access.  The goal is to have agencies be able to share information since we have common customers, but they are looking for an appropriate way to administer this."

I'll suppress some emotions here by making a couple points:

1. the "Common" in the CLU refers to the idea it would be shared between FSA and NRCS. I've a vague memory that we made some compromises or changes in the business rules for it in order to support NRCS data.  Essentially it's the lowest common denominator between ASCS acreage data and NRCS. 
2. the dream of enabling one change to update both ASCS and SCS databases for name and address and land data dates back to the late 1980's, as a result of the impact of the sodbuster/swampbuster rules in  the 1986 farm bill.  So thirty years later we're still struggling with the issue.
3. as a liberal, I usually support government programs, but sometimes I wonder how capable we bureaucrats really are.  (Of course, I quickly turn to blaming Congress for many of the failures. :=))

Scholarships for Black Ag

Apparently the National Black Farmers Association linked up with Chrysler to sponsor scholarships for students in agriculture.

Geezer Meets the Smart Phone

I've been easing myself into the world of smartphones.  Started cheap, with a Lumia 435, relying mostly on my WiFi network but no carrier so no real GPS.  When that phone failed, I jumped on an offer for Google FI, using a Nexus 5X (an offer I wouldn't have taken had I fully understood the terms--did I mention I tend to be cheap). That means I can use its GPS capabilities.  That's become handy in the last few days.

My sister's death meant I inherited a number of paintings and photographs passed on from my aunt and uncle, who worked for the YMCA in China in the 1920's, and who also had inherited tintypes from my grandparents.  Recently I've been contacting people to work on these objects, conservators to restore the paintings and digitally restore the tintypes.  That's led me into the maze of streets in suburban Washington.  Rather than the nice gridwork of DC the inner suburbs inside the Beltway are very confusing, a bunch of cul-de-sacs, really unfamiliar to me, just the sort of situation in which a GPS becomes very valuable.

Naturally at first I didn't try it, it was new, and I had spent years being able to read maps, so who needed it. Being old has impaired my judgment though.  The other day was telling. I thought I knew to take the first turn from I-66 after getting on in Fairfax City.  I did, and found I was totally confused, because the intersections I saw didn't match what was on Google.  (I should have waited and taken the second turn.) In desperation I turned to the GPS function.  Over the next few minutes I learned to accept the GPS voice enough to accept her directions to get back on I-66, and then to get off at the right exit.  Live and learn.

Politicians Pander

Fallows has a long piece on the candidates and the upcoming debates.

Politicians pander. That's what you do.

I've done just enough public speaking (definitely not my forte--I drone) to occasionally experience the thrill of reading your audience and responding to their response.  It's like making love.  And that's what politicians, the ones who have thrived enough to have a national presence, do.  Throughout Fallow's piece you can see the techniques analyzed.

In this episode the Kentucky governor gets carried away by pander. 

Should I Leave Wells Fargo?

Consider the title of this post : http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2016/09/13/wells-fargo-fired-5300-workers-for-illegal-sales-push-executive-in-charge-retiring-with-125-million/

Remember this when people complain about waste and fraud in government. 

Privatizing Pensions--Chile

I'm old enough to remember when the right was pushing the idea of privatizing pensions, pointing to the success of Chile's system.  (They'd been advised by Chicago-school economists, 
and see this.)

But the NYTimes today reports that the system is under fire, because the benefits received under the system don't replace more than 36 or so percent of wages and for other reasons.

We liberals will doubtless say "we told you so", which is always fun.  But the better lesson might be to always be careful of reforms sold as panaceas, from whatever side.  Humans tend to run from one side of the boat to the other, whether under the grip of enthusiasm or despair.

(I wonder how New Zealand's economic reforms, particularly of the agricultural economy, are faring these days?)

Different Platforms

From a piece at  Monkey Cag:

The [Democratic] platform mentions whites only in the context of their greater wealth, lower arrest rates and lower job losses.
In contrast, the Republican platform never refers explicitly to Latinos or people of color, and refers to African Americans or Hispanics only once and then in the context of seeking to reduce federal expenditures on primary and secondary education. It refers to women only in the contexts of the military and the pro-life position on abortion. In short, the Democratic platform takes an implicitly negative position on the relative economic fortunes of white males, while the Republican platform takes a neutral one.

Terrorism, What I Wrote 10 Years Ago

vIt's not quite 10 years since I (very tentatively) ventured a prediction on terrorism.  My complete post of Sept 30, 2006:

Saturday, September 30, 2006

What Does The Future Hold?

The Times has an analysis of the new legislation on terrorism which includes these thoughts:

How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered — and surely if one succeeds — it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.
If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill. “If there is never another terrorist attack and we never obtain actionable intelligence, this will look like a huge overreaction,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.

The last paragraph is what I'm inclined to think.

Obviously we've had terrorist attacks since.  I think, however, if you'd told the US in 2006 that deaths in the US from terrorism would be low, we'd have been very happy.  (Can't find a handy up-to-date source for these deaths, but I'm going to say 2006 through 2015 saw fewer than 30 such deaths per year, at least for deaths from terrorists with some affiliation to Islam.)