Fixing SCOTUS

 I tend to the position that any "fix" to SCOTUS is likely going to be worse than the current situation.  Vox has 10 possibilities discussed here.

I heard of an intriguing suggestion, can't remember where now: each president gets to appoint two justices to the court.  The court is composed of the 9 most recent living appointees. Any others still living who wish can take senior status (as Justice Souter has).  Except for the possibility of the Senate refusing to confirm an appointee, which I've seen handled in another proposal, it seems a reasonable suggestion.  

Clearance Rates on Homicides

 This piece describes six reasons that the clearance rate for homicides has declined. 

None of them mention my guess at a possible reason: a higher proportion of gang/drug-related murders. There were gangs in the 60's; the Mafia was active. But it seems to me there's more conflict among gangs now, fights over territory for selling drugs, etc.  Gangs have and enforce the code of silence, and they have more power to intimidate possible witnesses.  

On the Margins--a Metaphor

 Behind our townhouse there's a strip of lawn at the foot of a sloping bank up to a strip of the woods which remain from the original landscape before the townhouse cluster was developed.  Originally when I bought the townhouse from the developer the bank was planted to grass.  When the maintenance company's crew mowed the lawn it also mowed the grass on the bank.  For a few years.

Unfortunately the bank was good Virginia red clay, so the grass never thrived. It was invaded by weeds, which soon the mowing crew decided not to cut. Over the years some woody brush has filled in behind the weeds, which have advanced down the bank and into the strip of lawn. Just the other day I noticed how narrow the strip of lawn had gotten, as each year the crew abandoned more land to the weeds.

The situation reminds me of the borders of our fields, back on the farm I grew up on.  Something similar happened there.  First you have a fence, and a few weeds grow up around it.  The fence posts prevent you from mowing under the fence, so you mow within a foot or two of it.  But areas which aren't mowed become a niche for brush to grow up, which shades the adjacent area, where the weeds invade next. 

When mowing hay, you don't really want to cut brush which might get baled, or which might clog the cutter bar of the mowing machine.  So each year you mow just a tad further away from the original fence, and so the brush becomes a hedgerow, and the hedgerow grows and grows.

Which is sort of like my sideburns.  Particularly since covid, I go a long time between haircuts. When I shave each morning, somehow my sideburns become a little longer, meaning when I do get a haircut the barber needs to shave them back to their original place.

Bottom line: I think hedgerows and sideburns become good metaphors for what happens on the margins of states, the Roman empire, and organizations. Often the returns from maintaining them don't really justify the investment needed to sustain the difficult maintenance. 

Coal for Heat and Hot Water

This Smithsonian piece on coal brought back memories. The theme is the process and the difficulties in getting American households to switch from wood to coal, from open burning to enclosed burning.

I grew up in a house with two coal burners--our kitchen stove was a coal burner, though we could burn wood as well.  In fact, in order to get a coal fire started first you burn some wood.  During the colder months we kept the coal fire going all the time, banking the fire during the night, bringing it alive during the day, after removing the previous day's accumulated ashes to the dump near the side door.  Midway during my years we added an electric stove, very handy for cooking, particularly during the hot days of the summer when you really didn't want a fire going.  (Before the electric stove there was a kerosene cook stove.)

The other coal burner was the furnace, providing hot air to heat the house.  The evidence of the past was visible in the shapes of the chimneys in the walls, two of them; one was still used for the cook stove and the "one-a-day" (a woodburner in the basement which heated water, mostly for weekly baths; the other was closed off.  The chimney for the furnace was outside the house.  I've a vague memory of its being built, or perhaps rebuilt with cinder blocks, so possibly it was originally connected to the second chimney.   It too was banked during the night, which was an acquired skill.

The coal was delivered yearly by dump truck, maybe a couple tons of anthracite of different sizes: smaller for the cook stove; larger for the furnace, into separate bins in the basement.

Should I Apologize?

 Reading comments in the FSA Employees Group in Facebook. One noted the proliferation of programs, arguing that Congress should restrain itself.  

One of the things I tried to do during my time on the program side was to make things more efficient, particularly on the software side.  I also got involved in crash efforts when Congress or the administration came up with new programs (1983 payment-in-kind and 1986 disaster I remember particularly). I think I was reasonably successful, so why might I need to apologize?

Isn't there a parable of the  beast of burden which is always able to handle the loads which it's given, until one day the master adds the last straw? (Can't find it in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_that_broke_the_camel%27s_back, but it seems as if there should be one.)

My point: I was just part of a long tradition in AAA/ASCS/FSA of employees taking pride in implementing programs quickly, which created a reputation among policy makers, which led to more and more programs. 

To some extent this is democratic policy making--IRS, SBA, etc. had similar problems in responding to the economic impact of the pandemic. 

But the reality is if we had been screwing up programs in the 1980s and 90s, the employees today won't be overloaded. 

We Need More CoDels

 Politico has a post on the unseen advantages of "Codels"--Congressional delegations visiting foreign countries. Because there's lots of travel time, and less actual meeting time, a codel throws the members together in a non-political environment, allowing them to experience each other as humans, not stereotypes.

A codel also has the advantage of seeming to be work; it doesn't seem to be a vacation or a boondoggle (at least sometimes).  

So maybe some foundation should sponsor domestic codels.

Pigford Case Resolved

 Don't know if I've blogged on this part of the Pigford case before, but here's a case which ends in pleas of guilty by four of the six defendants.

Ukraine-Russia--Siloes Everywhere

  A quote from an assessment of the conflict: 

One challenge here is that NATO standardisation is not very standardised, with different countries’ howitzers not only having completely different maintenance requirements but also using different charges, fuses and sometimes shells.

The old story 

USDA Budget Baseline

 I found this table in the CRS report on farm bill basics interesting: 

What jumps out is the huge increase in the baseline for nutrition programs. 

Douglass on USA Mission

Frederick Douglass had a speech on the US, partially focused on Chinese immigration during a time when that was a big thing.  

Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen.

That's a vision of America I can endorse.  It's backed by this Bloomberg interview about immigration.