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<\/a><\/p>\nOn Bunny Inspectors and why I don\u2019t implement comments:<\/p>\n
I recently had mail from a reader who took me to task for my frequent mentions of Federal Bunny Inspectors. <\/p>\n
For those who don\u2019t know, these are Federal Inspectors employed by the Department of Agriculture to enforce laws requiring you to have a Federal \u2013 not local, not state, but Federal \u2013 permit to sell rabbits as pets<\/a>. Actually it gets worse: they also go about investigating stage magicians including local amateur stage acts<\/a> to see if there is a rabbit involved in the act. Interestingly, if you kill the rabbit in the act, or sell them for meat, or even feed them to snakes, no Federal license is required. Only if you use them in the stage act, in which case you must have a license and proper transportation equipment, and yes, highly paid Federal civil servants actually roam the land looking for magic acts that may or may not employ rabbits. And you get to pay interest on money we borrow from China to pay these civil servants including their medical care and retirement benefits.<\/p>\n My correspondent told me that this was a tiny amount of money. His subject was \u201corders of magnitude\u201d and he in essence accused me of innumeracy. I pointed out that this was intended as symbolic of a greater problem, and his remark was<\/p>\n I do understand the concept of symbolism. I understand it as an inferior substitute for reasoning.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n At this point I must have taken leave of my senses, because I answered that by saying that my point was that a country that can\u2019t cut this kind of spending can\u2019t cut anything else. And of course that got me<\/p>\n Not necessarily. Larger programs are more heavily defended, but also more heavily attacked.<\/p>\n For instance, the F-35 jet engine<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Which ought to be sufficient explanation for why I don\u2019t open this place up for general comments. I would spend my life in conversations like this, in which the object is to score points. That can be fun, but it\u2019s not a terribly productive way to spend time, and I never seem to have enough time nowadays. It\u2019s bad enough when I\u2019m tempted to answer mail.<\/p>\n And alas, it remains true: if we can\u2019t manage to eliminate Bunny Inspectors, we aren\u2019t likely to eliminate programs like Head Start, which are popular and which everyone, everyone I know anyway, wishes mightily would work. I don\u2019t know anyone who doesn\u2019t wish Head Start would work. Indeed, if Head Start did what we all hope it would do, it would save us a lot of money. The trouble is that Head Start doesn\u2019t work. There are literally hundreds of studies, all conducted by people who very much want Head Start to work, and none of them are able to find any objective means of demonstrating any effect of Head Start lasting more than a year or so. Ten years after Head Start its alumni have grades, dropout rates, crime rates, and anything else you would like to measure that are indistinguishable from those who did not experience Head Start. Charles Murray, who fervently wishes Head Start would work, has been in program assessment work much of his life; he\u2019s one of those who searched avidly for any data showing success. There isn\u2019t any.<\/p>\n If we can\u2019t eliminate Bunny Inspectors we aren\u2019t going to eliminate Head Start. If we can\u2019t get rid of Department of Education SWAT Teams, we won\u2019t be able to get rid of much of the imbecility of \u201cNo Child Left Behind\u201d AKA \u201cNo Child Gets Ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n John Derbyshire, a sometimes correspondent whom I admire considerably, rails that the US Education System is already working about as well as it can<\/a>. <\/p>\n Pretty much everything any politician says about education makes me want to go up to whoever said it, grab him by the suit-jacket lapels, and shake him forcefully up and down while screaming in his face: \u201cDON\u2019T YOU GET IT? YOU\u2019RE AN INTELLIGENT GUY\u2014WHY CAN\u2019T YOU SEE WHAT\u2019S RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOUR NOSE?\u201d<\/p>\n Case in point: Three years ago New York City hired the Rand Corporation to raise public-school students\u2019 test scores by paying cash bonuses to teachers whose classes performed well. More than $56 million in bonuses was handed out.<\/p>\n Results? There weren\u2019t any. \u201cResearchers called the experiment a bust,\u201d reports the New York Post<\/a><\/i>. You could have knocked Mayor Michael Bloomberg down with a feather. \u201cI would have thought it would have had a bigger effect,\u201d he gasped. That was the point where the lapel-grab impulse seized me.<\/p>\n Read more: http:\/\/takimag.com\/article\/ He has other instances. <\/p>\n And he\u2019s both wrong and right. Given the criteria we are using for whether or not education works, he\u2019s pretty well right, and certainly right in that throwing more money into this imbecilic system of education isn\u2019t going to bring about noticeable improvements.<\/p>\n But our criteria are based on Lake Wobegon, when in reality, half our children are below average. Bill Gates may finally have figured this out: for many years he said that every American child deserved a world class university prep education in K-12. I haven\u2019t heard him saying that recently. Perhaps he understands that condemning the below average children to a world class university prep education condemns them to years of pure hell. <\/p>\n But that\u2019s another essay, and I\u2019m running low on time. <\/p>\n My point is that if we can\u2019t make obvious cuts in useless actions of government, we aren\u2019t ready to tackle really tough problems. We have to have a mechanism for trimming out the ridiculous so that our supposedly intelligent legislators can actually look at the hideously expensive and well intentioned programs that are not working.<\/p>\n View 686 Friday, August 05, 2011 Roberta \u2018s sprained knee has recovered enough to let us take a walk around the block \u2013 two blocks, actually, since we go down past Ed Begley Jr.\u2019s house \u2013 he drove past in his electric car, which is powered from the solar panels \u2026 Continue reading \n
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print#ixzz1UBeJpU00<\/a> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"