And All the Cars Are Shiny

I've another line to add to Garrison Keillor's lines about Lake Woebegon, but this one reflect modern times, not the egotism of the town. I was sitting in the parking lot waiting for my wife to finish grocery shopping (she picks up fruits and vegetables at the Hispanic supermarket after our regular Saturday lunch).
Ann Althouse has been on a recent kick of taking photos of cars, mainly classic cars, and that got me conscious of the cars in the lot. Compared to the vehicles in a similar lot when I was young (ed.--there were no Hispanic supermarkets within 125 miles of where you grew up) they looked newer and much shinier. Newer because I don't think exterior styling has changed as much since 1995 as it did between 1945 and 1960. Shinier because of improvements in paint.

Are US Bureaucrats Better Than Brits?

Far be it from me to say so. Comparing the farm programs in the two countries is comparing apples and elephants. And the British reorganized their bureaucracy and changed their payment system recently. But still, this article reporting that the British bureaucracy still hasn't made 22,000 payments for 2005 says something to me.

A Tale of Two Vanities

I bought my house over 30 years ago, new. More than 15 years ago I replaced the vanity in one bathroom.

While I hadn't done such work before, I had watched my father do all sorts of work on the farm, carpentry, plumbing repairs, concrete, painting, fixing farm implements. The Army in its infinite wisdom considered my test scores and disregarded my college background in American studies to decide that I would best serve the country as a generator repairman. (They then decided I could teach, as they started running both day and night classes, but soon realized my monotone was putting all my night students asleep so shipped me off to a warmer zone.) After buying my house, I decided to save by building some of my furniture, which I did and reasonably well. We still have a couple of chairs.

Finally, although I couldn't refer to the Internet for help, I could go to the Reader's Digest "How To..." series. So I assured my wife and my self that I could do this replacement. Unfortunately I didn't realize how interdependent plumbing systems are. If you decide to replace a 24" deep vanity with a 21" deep vanity (small bathroom), the drain pipe is no longer aligned with the sink drain.

No problem, I went off to the hardware store to find the proper parts. Unfortunately, I failed to measure before I went. And I never asked for help, not on my first visit to the store, not on my second visit to the store, not on the third visit to the store.

The more problems I ran into, the more frustrated I got and the more urgent it was for me to finish the job. So I threw things together, installed everything, spent a couple days trying to remedy a leak at the connection between the sink drain and the trap, and finally called it good enough for government work. And I regret the job every time I look at it.

Fast forward to yesterday, when my long-suffering wife decided she could put up with my replacing the vanity in another bathroom. After we bought the vanity and top, I went to the hardware store and asked for help. I got all the plumbing parts in about 10 minutes. And I'm doing lots of trial runs, dry fitting of the vanity and the plumbing together. I'm also taking breaks, as now, because I still get very frustrated (perhaps more than I used to) when I run into problems (like floors and walls not being perfectly plumb and square).

So I say with Ecclesiastes: Vanity, vanity, all is vanity.

Farewell Tony

Tony Blair officially announced the end of his prime ministership yesterday. I'm sorry to see him go.

I'm glad I wasn't writing a blog in 2002/3, because I wavered all over the lot on Iraq. Read the liberal hawks, like Kenneth Pollack, or the reluctant hawk Bill what's-his-face who's now editor of the NYTimes and I'd support Bush. Watch Bush or Cheney or Rice, and I'd start to remember Vietnam. I'd think, just because you were right (or so it seemed at the time) about Afghanistan doesn't mean that Iraq is a good idea. I'd think, what about Cap Weinberger (who set some famous criteria in the 1980's for using US troops), what about the Powell doctrine (which was a development of Weinberger's criteria) of using overwhelming force? How does that Republican doctrine fit with Wolfowitz's dismissal of Shinseki's warning?

But then I'd watch Blair, both in the US and in the C-Span coverage of Britain, and he was convincing. He didn't use Bush's simplistic, moralistic language of battling evil men. (Yes, I believe in evil, but analyzing one's enemies as simply evil is not the way to truth.) But he made a moral case, one that appeals to the moralistic liberal in me and that seemed more realistic about the effort needed.

What I failed to see was that Bush was in charge of implementation. Fatal error, fatal for many.

I'm not sure I mentioned reading the book "Long Way Gone" by Ishmael Beah, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone. Blair sent troops into Sierra Leone to stabilize the situation. That was an achievement, which one can appreciate from reading the book. (Though Blair isn't mentioned.)

The assessments of Blair in the papers haven't been particularly kind. They lean towards describing a glib politician who didn't achieve much and stuck too close to Bush. All that may be true, but I have to salute someone who got Paisley and Adams to the bargaining table in Northern Ireland.

Random Thought--Bonds and Sosa

I have the proper disdain for Barry Bonds and his effort to surpass Hank Aaron, whom I remember surpassing the unsurpassable (as it seemed in the 1950's) record of Babe Ruth. Steroids have no place in baseball.

Yet, and yet. Sammy Sosa is back playing and he and Barry are in the top ten homer hitters in their respective leagues. Now there seem to be two alternatives: either they're still on steroids, so the current testing routine is ineffective, or they're no longer on steroids, in which case their hitting exploits seem a bit more legitimate.

Why can't things get simpler as you get older.

Fruits, Vegetables, Blue Corn and True History

The May 8 Post has independent pieces with much the same point. Jeffrey Birnbaum outlines how the fruit and vegetable growers are hoping to get a bigger piece of money in the new farm bill. He says that they were long disdained as "specialty crops" but now are better organized and hope to have influence because they're strong in states often dubious of the farm programs (like CA and WA).

Meanwhile, over in Business a columnist for Bloomberg, Cindy Skrzycki takes up the cause of "blue corn" (usually used for tortillas), which hasn't met the definition of "corn" for the purpose of the farm programs. The lobbyist for the growers is testifying before Congress to get that changed:

He recounted the story of a Nebraska blue-corn farmer who went to his local USDA Commodity Credit Corp. office to apply for a low-interest, nine-month loan against his harvest. Clarkson said he was told he didn't qualify because he wasn't growing corn.

To oversimplify, the original farm programs were intended for field crops and dairy, commodities that could be stored (in the form of cheese and butter for dairy). They were intended to aid marketing by offering nonrecourse loans on stored commodities to keep them off the market until prices improved. They also had various measures to reduce production, to try to bring supply into line with balance.

Fruits, vegetables, and blue corn didn't fit into this picture. But by the 1990's things started to change. The supply management/production adjustment side of the programs was phased out (ending with the buyout of tobacco quotas this century). The phase out both complied with World Trade Organization rules on delinking subsidies and production and responded to the views of economists that allowing the market to give signals on what to produce, signals unclouded by subsidies, was the efficient way to go.

Meanwhile the provisions for loans on stored commodities were also changed. Loan deficiency payments and marketing assistance loans became ways of circumventing payment limitation and WTO rules [perhaps a biased view of mine]. Loans on actual stored commodities diminished in overall importance.

So by 2000 the picture is: crop farmers are getting money that's not closely tied to commodities. So blue corn, fruit and vegetable farmers say--if Uncle Sam is handing out money, why isn't he handing any my way?

In my view, while these farmers may have better lobbyists now, and connect with the zeitgeist better (natural foods, eating well, anti-obesity), their probable gains in the next farm bill also reflect the change in farm programs.

Fat Is Genetic

Yesterday I blogged on a possible relationship between welfare reform and obesity. Today the Times has an article by Gina Kolata reporting on research that shows a very high correlation between heredity and obesity. Two big studies, one on identical twins reared in different families, the other line of research is fat people who lost weight (and then regained it) and thin people who gained weight to become fat (and then lost it).

I can, reluctantly, accept the research. There's a long history of things about which people have theorized, often finding moral lessons in the theory. Unfortunately science normally blows the theories up, or at least severely complicates them, so I can't claim be good because my weight is about what it was when I graduated from college and therefore can't look down on people who differ from me by 100 pounds or so. Life often disappoints that way.

Welfare Reform and Fat Kids

One of the continuing marvels of life is the epidemic of obesity. It strikes me that welfare reform may have played a part in recent developments. The logic is, as more "welfare mothers" find jobs, the time and energy available to cook decreases and the temptation to buy ready-made and fast food rises.. See this Economic Research service pub for some background information.

David Brooks and 90 Percent

David Brooks had a poor column in the NY Times on Thursday. It's couched as advice to Wolfowitz and other Republicans, saying that 90 percent of any bureaucracy they come into are Dems, 90 percent of the media are Dems, etc. Lesson: although some will be partisan, most can be worked with, so work with them.

I quarrel with his figures, as well as the message. The percentage of Dems depends on the bureaucracy (DOD and VA are different than HHS and Education, also much larger). I'd guess that the military is mostly Reps (are they bureaucrats--yes, according to conservative scholar James Q. Wilson in "Bureaucracy".) DOD civilians are likely to be marginally Reps. So was Rumsfeld undermined by the Democratic military and DOD establishment? Obviously not.

For most bureaucracies and most bureaucrats in government, politics are much less important than daily living. The better comparison is to changing managers/coaches on an athletic team. Bush naming Wolfowitz to the World Bank is like Steinbrenner naming a good college baseball man to replace Joe Torre. The new guy has to step carefully.

Shakespeare in Odd Places

Just finished reading Ishmael Beah's book, "Long Way Gone", about his life in Sierra Leone, including as a child soldier. I recommend it. The material is grim but the narrative flows without self-pity or dramatics.

Last night my wife and I watched "Bollywood/Hollywood", a movie by Deepak Mehta featuring Lisa Ray. Mehta did "Water" with Ray, which got an Oscar nominee as best foreign film. Ray is stunningly beautiful, and not a bad actress. The movie is fun if you don't take it seriously. It would help if I knew more about Bollywood films because it has some in-jokes, but it's still a pleasant evening. Plot: rich son needs someone to pose as his intended wife to get mother and grandmother off his back until his pregnant sister gets safely married.

How do these relate to Shakespeare? Well, Beah as a child recites Shakespearean speeches for family and friends. He also gets into rap, hip-hop, and reggae and treasures his cassettes of rappers whose names I barely recognize. After becoming a soldier, his lieutenant spends his down time reading Julius Caesar. In the movie, grandmother uses Shakespearean snippets in egging on her grandson.

So a barefoot boy from Avon writes language that 400 years later is part of the culture of both Sierra Leone and India. And rap evolves in the Caribbean and US and travels back to Africa. The world is strange and wonderful