Government – Page 57 – artdiamondblog.com

Dems Take Taxpayers’ Earnings to Spend on Senator Reid’s Cowboy Poets

“Charlie Seemann at the Western Folklife Center in Elko, Nev., home to an annual festival that draws thousands of cowboy poets and their fans.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) ELKO, Nev. — This isolated town in the northeast Nevada mountains is known for gold mines, ranches, casinos, bordellos and J. M. Capriola, a destination store with two floors of saddles, boots, spurs and chaps. It is also the birthplace of the annual Cowboy Poetry Gathering, a celebration of range song and poetry that draws thousands of cowboys and their fans every January and receives some money from the federal government.
. . .
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, a Democrat and the majority leader, invoked the event in arguing against Republican cuts in arts financing in the budget debate, setting off a conflagration of conservative scorn.
. . .
“He was trying to defend the National Endowment for the Humanities and the N.E.A., and he thought, this is something that he was familiar with and he’s always liked, and he was holding this up as an example,” said Charlie Seemann, the executive director of the Western Folklife Center, a converted 98-year-old hotel on Railroad Street. “And, whoops! In this political climate it was too good a target: ‘Cowboy poetry, say what? We’re paying for that?’
. . .
“Given where we are with our financial situation — and some people would argue regardless of that — this is not something that the federal government should be doing,” said Thomas A. Schatz, the president of Citizens Against Government Waste. “If people want to support a certain amount of activity in the arts or humanities, they should be paying for it. And the fact that Senator Reid for some reason picked this as an example of how extreme the Republican budget was — he might have picked something else.”
Inevitably, some of the argument, as it were, is taking place in verse. Representative Jeff Flake, a conservative Republican from Arizona, posted this on his Twitter account:

Way out in the prairie

To a rustler named Harry
Being broke ain’t no reason to sweat
Just sit in yer barn
Spin a rhythmic yarn
And you’ll pay down the national debt!

For the full story, see:
ADAM NAGOURNEY. “For Cowboy Poets, Unwelcome Spotlight in Battle Over Spending.” The New York Times (Mon., April 11, 2011): A15 & A17.
(Note: ellipses added; italics and indents in original print version.)
(Note: the date of the online version of the article is April 10, 2011.)

“Planning Fallacy”: Overly Optimistic Forecasting of Project Outcomes

(p. 250) This should not come as a surprise: overly optimistic forecasts of the outcome of projects are found everywhere. Amos and I coined the term planning fallacy to describe plans and forecasts that

are unrealistically close to best-case scenarios

could be improved by consulting the statistics of similar cases

. . .
The optimism of planners and decision makers is not the only cause of overruns. Contractors of kitchen renovations and of weapon systems readily admit (though not to their clients) that they routinely make most of their profit on additions to the original plan. The failures of forecasting in these cases reflect the customers’ inability to imagine how much their wishes will escalate over time. They end up paying much more than they would if they had made a realistic plan and stuck to it.
Errors in the initial budget are not always innocent. The authors of unrealistic plans are often driven by the desire to get the plan approved–(p. 251)whether by their superiors or by a client–supported by the knowledge that projects are rarely abandoned unfinished merely because of overruns in costs or completion times. In such cases, the greatest responsibility for avoiding the planning fallacy lies with the decision makers who approve the plan. If they do not recognize the need for an outside view, they commit a planning fallacy.

Source:
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
(Note: ellipsis added; italics in original.)

“Let the Consumers Decide When and Where They Want to Eat”

“Rachel Billow is the co-founder of La Cocinita, a food truck in New Orleans that serves Latin American cuisine. She says the city’s requirement that mobile food vendors change locations after 45 minutes in one spot isn’t feasible. “It takes about a half-hour to set up,” she says.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B8) A street fight is brewing between gourmet food-truck vendors and restaurants–not over the grub, but how it’s sold.

Under pressure to protect bricks-and-mortar restaurants from increased competition, several big cities are starting to apply the brakes on a rising tide of food-truck vendors with fully loaded kitchens.
Boston, Chicago, St. Louis and Seattle are among the cities enacting laws that restrict where food trucks can serve customers in proximity to their rivals and for how long. Some food-truck operators argue that they shouldn’t be punished for offering an innovative service, especially since many cities already allow restaurants to open up alongside one another.
“The rules are unfair,” says Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, a food truck in Chicago serving Asian-style cuisine that includes short ribs and mango lychee.
Three weeks after she launched the business last fall, she received a ticket from local law enforcement for doing business about 150 feet from a wine bar–50 feet within the city’s limit for how close food trucks can park outside of retail food establishments.
Ms. Le says she later had to spend nearly a full day in court to find out what the violation would cost her–about $300–and that she lost an estimated $600 to $700 in sales as a result.
“The 200-foot buffer prohibits me from competing,” says Ms. Le, 32 years old, who also opposes a new rule requiring food trucks to install global-positioning devices so the city can track their whereabouts. “It is a free market. Let the consumers decide when and where they want to eat.”
. . .
Gourmet food-truck operators say another problem is that in many cities they are still relegated to antiquated rules intended for ice-cream, hot-dog and other traditional mobile vendors with smaller and less complex menus.
New Orleans, for example, requires mobile food vendors to change locations after 45 minutes in one spot, among other restrictions.
“It’s not a feasible amount of time for this business model,” says 31-year-old Rachel Billow, who last year co-founded La Cocinita, a food truck that serves Latin American cuisine such as plantains and arepas. “It takes about a half-hour to set up.”
Ms. Billow says she and her business partner, Venezuelan chef Benoit Angulo, started La Cocinita after several years of working in the restaurant industry. They invested $50,000 in start-up costs, an amount that included $12,000 in modifications to their vehicle to satisfy the city’s fire code, she adds.

For the full story, see:
SARAH E. NEEDLEMAN. “Street Fight: Food Trucks vs. Restaurants; Some Big Cities Jump Into the Fray, Enacting Parking Restrictions to Cope With Rising Tide of Gourmet Vendors.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., August 9, 2012): B8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“Amy Le, owner of Duck N Roll, an Asian-style food truck in Chicago, says last fall she received a fine for doing business about 150 feet from a wine bar–50 feet within the city’s limit for how close food trucks can park outside of retail food establishments.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited above.

In Health Care, He Who Pays the Piper, Calls the Tune

(p. A15) Under the Bloomberg plan, any cup or bottle of sugary drink larger than 16 ounces at a public venue would be verboten, beginning early next year.
. . .
Here is the ultimate justification for the Bloomberg soft-drink ban, not to mention his smoking ban, his transfat ban, and his unsuccessful efforts to enact a soda tax and prohibit buying high-calorie drinks with food stamps: The taxpayer is picking up the bill.
Call it the growing chattelization of the beneficiary class under government health-care programs. Bloombergism is a secular trend. Los Angeles has sought to ban new fast-food shops in neighborhoods disproportionately populated by Medicaid recipients, Utah to increase Medicaid copays for smokers, Arizona to impose a special tax on Medicaid recipients who smoke or are overweight.

For the full commentary, see:
HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR. “BUSINESS WORLD; The 5th Avenue to Serfdom; Nobody thought about taking away your Big Gulp until the government began to pay for everyone’s health care.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 2, 2012): A15.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 1, 2012.)

Veterinarians Can Suggest Innovative Hypotheses to Doctors

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

Vets face less government regulation and so are freer to rapidly innovate. They may thus be a promising source of innovative hypotheses for medical doctors.

(p. D2) Cardiologist Barbara Natterson-Horowitz made her first foray into the world of animal medicine when she was asked to treat Spitzbuben, an exceedingly cute emperor tamarin suffering from heart failure.

But first, the veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo warned Dr. Natterson-Horowitz: Mere eye contact with the tiny primate could trigger a potentially fatal surge of stress hormones. What she learns from that experience spurs a journey to examine the links between the human and animal condition–and the discovery that the species are closer than she ever imagined.
. . .
The authors recommend that doctors, who often look with disdain on veterinarians, go the next step and collaborate with them in a cross-disciplinary “zoobiquitous” approach–using knowledge about how animals live, die and heal to spark innovative hypothesis for advancing medicine.

For the full review, see:
LAURA LANDRO. “Healthy Reader.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., June 12, 2012): D2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date June 11, 2012.)

The book being reviewed, is:
Natterson-Horowitz, Barbara, and Kathryn Bowers. Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.

Take U.S.D.A. and C.D.C. Advice with a Grain of Salt

(p. 8) When I spent the better part of a year researching the state of the salt science back in 1998 — already a quarter century into the eat-less-salt recommendations — journal editors and public health administrators were still remarkably candid in their assessment of how flimsy the evidence was implicating salt as the cause of hypertension.
“You can say without any shadow of a doubt,” as I was told then by Drummond Rennie, an editor for The Journal of the American Medical Association, that the authorities pushing the eat-less-salt message had “made a commitment to salt education that goes way beyond the scientific facts.”
While, back then, the evidence merely failed to demonstrate that salt was harmful, the evidence from studies published over the past two years actually suggests that restricting how much salt we eat can increase our likelihood of dying prematurely. Put simply, the possibility has been raised that if we were to eat as little salt as the U.S.D.A. and the C.D.C. recommend, we’d be harming rather than helping ourselves.
. . .
When researchers have looked at all the relevant trials and tried to make sense of them, they’ve continued to support Dr. Stamler’s “inconsistent and contradictory” assessment. Last year, two such “meta-analyses” were published by the Cochrane Collaboration, an international nonprofit organization founded to conduct unbiased reviews of medical evidence. The first of the two reviews concluded that cutting back “the amount of salt eaten reduces blood pressure, but there is insufficient evidence to confirm the predicted reductions in people dying prematurely or suffering cardiovascular disease.” The second concluded that “we do not know if low salt diets improve or worsen health outcomes.”
. . .
(p. 9) A 1972 paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reported that the less salt people ate, the higher their levels of a substance secreted by the kidneys, called renin, which set off a physiological cascade of events that seemed to end with an increased risk of heart disease. In this scenario: eat less salt, secrete more renin, get heart disease, die prematurely.
With nearly everyone focused on the supposed benefits of salt restriction, little research was done to look at the potential dangers. But four years ago, Italian researchers began publishing the results from a series of clinical trials, all of which reported that, among patients with heart failure, reducing salt consumption increased the risk of death.
Those trials have been followed by a slew of studies suggesting that reducing sodium to anything like what government policy refers to as a “safe upper limit” is likely to do more harm than good. These covered some 100,000 people in more than 30 countries and showed that salt consumption is remarkably stable among populations over time.
. . .
One could still argue that all these people should reduce their salt intake to prevent hypertension, except for the fact that four of these studies — involving Type 1 diabetics, Type 2 diabetics, healthy Europeans and patients with chronic heart failure — reported that the people eating salt at the lower limit of normal were more likely to have heart disease than those eating smack in the middle of the normal range. Effectively what the 1972 paper would have predicted.
. . .
Maybe now the prevailing beliefs should be changed. The British scientist and educator Thomas Huxley, known as Darwin’s bulldog for his advocacy of evolution, may have put it best back in 1860. “My business,” he wrote, “is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations.”

For the full commentary, see:
GARY TAUBES. “OPINION; Salt, We Misjudged You.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., June 3, 2012): 8-9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 2, 2012.)

Hitchens Adds to the Case Against Woodrow Wilson

Source of book image:
http://media.oregonlive.com/books_impact/photo/9635633-large.jpg

Reading the review quoted below, reminded me of how much I will miss Christopher Hitchens.

(p. 12) If General Pershing’s fresh and plucky troops had not reached the scene in the closing stages of the bloodbath, universal exhaustion would almost certainly have compelled an earlier armistice, on less savage terms. Without President Wilson’s intervention, the incensed and traumatized French would never have been able to impose terms of humiliation on Germany; the very terms that Hitler was to reverse, by such relentless means, a matter of two decades later. In this light, the great American socialist Eugene V. Debs, who publicly opposed the war and was kept in prison by a vindictive Wilson until long after its ending, looks like a prescient hero. Indeed, so do many of the antiwar militants to whose often-buried record Hochschild has done honor. (Unsentimental to the last, though, he shows that many of them went on to lose or waste their lives on Bolshevism, the other great mutant system to emerge from the abattoir.) This is a book to make one feel deeply and painfully, and also to think hard.

For the full review, see:
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS. “Mortal Debate.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., May 15, 2011): 1 & 12.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date May 13, 2011, and has the title “The Pacifists and the Trenches.”)

The book under review is:
Hochschild, Adam. To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co., 2011.

Riots, Arson and Looting Returned in Spite of “State Largesse Lavished on Tottenham”

“As unrest flared in the U.K. on Aug. 7, fire raged through a building in Tottenham, north London–an area also the scene of riots 26 years ago.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A8) LONDON–After furious race riots broke out in London’s Tottenham area 26 years ago, government and local authorities poured millions of pounds into the district and especially Broadwater Farm estate, a notorious housing project that was the epicenter of the 1985 unrest.

Yet last week, Tottenham returned to an unwelcome spotlight as the point of ignition for riots here–and this time the unrest spread far beyond the neighborhood, to other parts of London and distant cities like Birmingham and Manchester.
What started as a peaceful protest over the killing of a local man by police was quickly seized on as an excuse for looting, arson and other unruly behavior by roaming packs of people that gripped the country for days. The result as of Sunday night: 1,401 arrests nationwide and a debate over who is to blame and how to prevent it happening again.
Tottenham’s repeat appearance in the rioting shows the sometimes limited effectiveness of urban-regeneration programs that fail to tackle the deep-seated problems of poor communities. The state largesse lavished on Tottenham has resulted in better facilities and nicer surroundings, yet the area is still blighted by high unemployment, a thriving gang culture and social breakdown, according to official data.

For the full story, see:
GUY CHAZAN And ALISTAIR MACDONALD. “State Aid Failed to Stem U.K. Unrest; Tottenham, Site of Past Violence, Saw Renewed Clashes Despite Government Efforts to Boost the Area.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., August 15, 2011): A8.

Bicyclists Create Negative Externalities for Pedestrians

“Bicyclists weave through pedestrians and motor traffic on Friday in San Francisco, where a fatal bike-pedestrian collision has sparked debate.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A3) SAN FRANCISCO–City prosecutors said they would file felony vehicular-manslaughter charges against a bicyclist who allegedly hit and killed a pedestrian, in a case that has become a flash point for debate over bicyclists’ rights in the city.

The manslaughter charges–unusually stiff for a bicycle accident–stem from a March 29 incident, when 36-year-old bicyclist Chris Bucchere allegedly ran a red traffic light and plowed into 71-year-old Sutchi Hui in a crosswalk. Mr. Hui died April 2 of injuries related to the collision.
. . .
The bicycle backlash has come to a head after a series of pedestrian deaths in the San Francisco Bay area. A 67-year-old woman died last August after a bicyclist allegedly hit her in a crosswalk after running a red light; the cyclist was convicted of a misdemeanor. Earlier this month, a cyclist allegedly struck and killed a 92-year-old woman in the suburb of El Cerrito while crossing a street; that case is under investigation.

For the full story, see:
JIM CARLTON. “U.S. NEWS; Reckless Riders Spur Backlash; Fatal Collision in San Francisco Leads to Manslaughter Charges Against Cyclist.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., June 16, 2012): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

“At Least Here I Am in Control of My Destiny”

“Ali Mesgaran and a friend at the sandwich shop he opened this year in Tehran. He said his shop was one place where he controlled his destiny.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A4) TEHRAN — About two months ago, when many Iranian families were stocking up on rice and meat to prepare for seemingly inevitable military conflict with the West over Iran’s nuclear program, Ali Mesgaran, 35, decided to open a sandwich shop.

Iran’s national currency, the rial, had just lost nearly half of its value amid new international sanctions, and banks and exchange offices were spilling over with orders for gold and foreign currency from people hoping to protect family savings from soaring inflation.
“There are always problems in this country,” Mr. Mesgaran said, explaining why he decided to open his shop, Piyaz Jafari, named after a traditional Iranian sandwich spread of onions and herbs. “We felt that if we ever wanted to be successful, we just had to ignore those.”
. . .
The widespread sense of hopelessness is reinforced by memories of the presidency of Mohammad Khatami, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, who was in power from 1997 to 2005. During his two terms, he tried to promote personal freedom, to encourage better relations with the West and to relax suffocating dress codes, drawing anger from conservatives but attracting millions of votes from youths and women.
. . .
(p. A12) On a recent day at Mr. Mesgaran’s sandwich shop, the talk was not about politics, but about the odd torrential rains that in recent weeks had flooded even parts of the city’s subway system. “This is my world,” he said, gesturing at his shop and his customers. “At least here I am in control of my destiny. That is a good feeling.”

For the full story, see:
THOMAS ERDBRINK. “TEHRAN JOURNAL; Pinched Aspirations of Iran’s Young Multitudes.” The New York Times (Tues., May 8, 2012): A4 & A12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date May 7, 2012.)