Blogging on bureaucracy, organizations, USDA, agriculture programs, American history, the food movement, and other interests. Often contrarian, usually optimistic, sometimes didactic, occasionally funny, rarely wrong, always a nitpicker.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Whole Foods and True Organics
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Rural School Population II
The Things You Find in Garbage, Er "Miscellaneous"
Sec. 11068. Prevention and investigation of payment and fraud and error.
This section would amend the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978 to require financial institutions to disclose the financial records of any customer to any government authority that certifies, disburses, or collects payments, when the disclosure of such information is necessary to verify the identity of any person in connection with the issuance of a federal payment or collection of funds, or the investigation or recovery of an improper federal payment of collection of funds.
No idea of the background for this.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Rural School Population
"Between 2002-03 and 2004-05, enrollment in schools located in communities of fewer than 2,500 increased by 1,339,000 (or 15%)," write Jerry Johnson and Marty Strange, policy analysts for the non-profit Rural School and Community Trust. School enrollment in larger communities (populations over 2,500) fell by 2% in this same period.
The study calls "most startling" its finding that the number of minority students increased 55% in rural schools, "with some states experiencing increases of over 100%." Rural schools in the Southeast and Southwest are the most ethnically diverse in the nation.
[Update--When I noted this to my sister, a former teacher, I looked at the figures and said, they can't be right. It didn't seem right that rural areas would have roughly 10 million students. I'm not sure what's going on, but this table from the Department of Education seems to show less than 1 million students in rural areas (plus towns under 2,500) in 2002. It might be the authors just slipped a zero somewhere. Or it might be I don't understand at all.]
Keith Collins on Agriculture
Bureaucratic Turf War Sprouting
Anyhow, it's a beauty of a turf war that sprouting right before our eyes.
Is a Farmer a Farmer a Farmer?
All of which is to say, when someone talks of the opinions of farmers, as here, [updated--I think it's an honest discussion, but often they aren't] take a grain of salt.
Friday, October 26, 2007
The Way the Media Works
What it means is that the institutional incentives are at work: anyone who wants attention has to have a good story, and conflict makes a hell of a better story than communion. (That's why blogs like mine have low readership--there's no conflict.)
Your NRCS at Work
Hillary as Manager
It's interesting. I think there's some relevant issues:
- "How many mistakes has she made and how well has she learned from them?" If you never do anything, you never screw up. If you never admit and learn from your mistakes, you're an idiot. Seems to me Hillary's okay here, except perhaps for being slow to admit mistakes. it's tough for any smart and ambitious person. Anyone remember any admissions of error by others in the race?
- Who would she appoint to her administration? Doris Kearns Goodwin got a book out of the fact that Lincoln appointed heavyweights to the Cabinet, and then managed them. Both parties will have a bench of talent to appoint (unlike Bill in 92--the 12 years in the wilderness meant talent was scarce). The idea that she has a tight circle doesn't bother me much--the issue is whether she'll expand it if elected. Her tight circle is better than GWB's was because they don't have an anti-Washington bias. The unknown is whether they have the balls to admit that GWB did some things right (Bush certainly had problems admitting that Bill had done some things right).