Most Interesting Sentence from Yesterday

Reading Aaron David Miller's book, The Much Too Promised Land, the sentence was something like: "Most Arab-Americans are not Muslim, most Muslim Americans are not Arab."

Most Surprising Sentence This Year?

It's missing from the on-line version, but in the print Post, car columnist Warren Brown ended his review of the new Jaguar with his standard line about comparable cars, which went something like:
"compare to X, Y, and Z, and believe or not, the Hyundai [something]."

Those South Koreans are fast learners.

Stem Rust and the Food Crisis

Norman Borlaug, the Nobel winner and father of the Green Revolution, has an op-ed in the NYTimes on the threat stem rust poses to wheat. Read the whole thing. I found this fact interesting:

From 1965 to 1985, the heyday of the Green Revolution, world production of cereal grains — wheat, rice, corn, barley and sorghum — nearly doubled, from 1 billion to 1.8 billion metric tons, and cereal prices dropped by 40 percent.

A Lesson in Log-Rolling and Back Scratching [updated[

Politico's report on the apparent deal on the farm bill is here.

A prime example of legislative log-rolling--one that deserves close study by any students of how government really works.

Jim Wiesemeyer provides some details.

The Dog That Didn't Bark

I like Charlie Peters. I may even have been a charter subscriber to his magazine, the Washington Monthly. But while I have sympathy for this, I don't expect anything to come of it:

As we mourn the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, the question begs: How could we have averted this tragic folly? As a journalist, I have naturally thought about what our profession could have done. It seems clear to me that an enterprising reporter could have discovered that the (alleged) evidence of WMD was manufactured, out of date, or relied on extremely dubious sources like the aptly named "Curveball."

I ask myself why we seem to find out what’s wrong only when a disaster has happened. After the coal mine explodes, we learn that proper safety procedures weren’t being followed. And only after a Hurricane Katrina do we learn how unprepared we were for a natural disaster. To encourage the media to find out in time instead of too late, Understanding Government is offering a $50,000 award for preventive journalism, for the best article that identifies inept leaders, misguided policies, and bureaucratic bungling in time to prevent another disaster.

Why? Read the Sherlock Holmes story--it's terribly difficult to identify the significance and the causes of something that didn't happen.

ID Cards for Government

Government Executive reports on the latest progress report on giving government employees and contractors fancy ID cards. If I understand, we went backwards from last year. And we're still falling short of Bush's objective. [smile]

Like to point out this line: "Agencies had blamed technical challenges to issuing the cards. For example, agencies had to develop solutions for integrating the IDs with support systems that maintain the data and provide an interface with enrollment and issuance functions."

In other words, your card is only as good as the underlying personnel system. If you don't have a good personnel system, it can't support a good ID card system. That's a small detail that program managers, like Bush (or, to be fair, like Gore before him) don't understand.

Disputing with the Dean of Duke

I've commented and re-commented on a post at Grist by Prof. Bill Chameides, the dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University. He's relying on Prof. Pollan for a description of the history of the farm programs in the 1970's.

I like my ending, which was to the effect the academics make the mistake that farm programs achieve the purposes for which they are intended.

Validity of Elections

Yes, elections are valid only if the votes are counted correctly. There's lots of concern over the touch screen machines and whether voters can verify the way they voted. See this post over at Project on Government Oversight.

But I'm a bit bemused--I voted for years using the old mechanical lever machines and wasn't able to verify my vote once. For all I know, it was all fake machinery and the real results were arrived at by the election workers. For some reason, the clanking of machinery seems more convincing and more reliable than the transfer of elections. I wonder why?

Secretaries Day

Here's a Slate article from the past on the day.

Run on Rice, the Gas Lines of the 70's

We now have panic, panic, I say, in the stores as people grab up rice and other staples because of fears of scarcity. See this LA Times story (also mentioned in Post and NYTimes today)--Costco and Sam's Club are putting limits on the amounts that can be bought. (Apparently restaurants go there for supplies.)

It reminds me of the gas lines in the 70's--no one wanted to run the risk of running out, so we all filled our tanks up whenever they hit the half-full mark, creating long gas lines. The available inventory moved from station tanks to car tanks, just as rice is moving from warehouses to pantries.

It's an interesting exercise--the economists would say that Costco should just double its price on rice again in order to ration supplies. But the reality is that food is an essential, particularly rice for a Chinese restaurant, so raising prices only slowly decreases demand; it's one of the reasons agriculture goes through booms and busts.