Counter-Clerks: What Scalia Got Right

A former law clerk for Justice Scalia writes about Scalia's "counter-clerks".  Usually each year he'd hire one of his four law clerks as a liberal, a devil's advocate whose mission was to keep his arguments honest.  Seems to me it's the sort of thing each Justice should have.  And not a bad thing for everyone.

George Washington Never Took a Bath? Not

In a tub, that is.  We have it on the authority of H.L. Mencken, who says Millard Fillmore was the first president to take a bath in a tub.  The tub, it seems, had just been invented.


Of course, Mencken later admitted the article was a complete hoax.

Pearlie Reed Dies

See Vilsack's statement,his obituary,a new story and a personal memory.

Japan and America

Via Marginal Revolution, a Mental Floss post of 10 tips for Japanese visiting the US.  Provides a glimpse of the cultural differences between the societies.

Organic Does Not Equal Small or American

Modern Farmer has a piece on the costs of converting farmland to organic (it requires a multi-year history of only organic methods being used, which is costly) so Costco is going to finance some vertical integration:

"This first initiative will find Costco partnering with Andrew & Williamson Fresh Produce, based in San Diego, to buy equipment and 1,200 acres of land just south of the border."

As I say in the previous post, the organic premium and demand is there now, but I predict an overbuilding of capacity. 

Organic Does Not Equal Locavore

A Bloomberg piece on the importing of organic grain from Romania and India.  It's certainly not energy-efficient.

This is related to the next post on Costco springing for the costs of converting farmland to organic.  I'd interpret both as saying the price premium for organic is promising enough to warrant these measures.  I'd also guess there will be at some point down the road an overbuilding of organic capacity, because farmers usually overshoot their market corrections.

More Divorce Equals Less Geographic Mobility

Joel Achenbach has a good post tied to his article in the Post on the increase in mortality rates among middle-aged white women.  This from a comment started me thinking:

"(Before you ask why he didn't just move to find a job: he couldn't leave the area because his ex-wife was still alive and he couldn't move the girls more than an hour from their mother, so he was pretty much stuck.) "

To the extent we have increased the number of children living in one-parent households over the years, we may have increased the obstacles to moving for jobs.  Similarly, the number of two-job households would also increase the obstacles.  For example, in the most extreme case a two-professor marriage needs complex negotiations with a new school in order to obtain new jobs for both.

Net result, the decline in mobility noted here.(Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution says it's land use restrictions.)

Which Branch Will Shoot Down Drones?

Politico has a piece on a US Army analysis of Russian military capabilities as demonstrated in Ukraine.  One paragraph:

Karber says the lethality of new Russian munitions has been striking, including the use of scatterable mines, which the U.S. States no longer possesses. And he counts at least 14 different types of drones used in the conflict and reports that one Ukrainian unit he was embedded with witnessed up to eight drone flights in a single day. “How do you attack an adversary’s UAV?” asks Clark. “Can we blind, disrupt or shoot down these systems? The U.S. military hasn’t suffered any significant air attacks since 1943.”

 Knowing the military bureaucracy, it's safe to predict that the Navy, the Marines, the Army, and the Air Force, not to mention the Secret Service and other bureaucracies will all invest in anti-drone research, set up anti-drone units, and lobby Congress to be the lead agency.

Speculation: I'd guess the easiest way to go with drones is to jam their communications, but we'll see.

We Ran a Micro-Dairy

Moliere had a character who was surprised to be told he was speaking prose.  I'm surprised to learn I grew up on a micro-dairy.  That's according to a NYTimes piece today.  No specifics on what constitutes a "micro-dairy"; one instance mentioned has 12 cows so I guess we qualify.

The characteristic which we didn't share with the dairies described is: processing.  These dairies do their own processing and then sell into a niche market.

This is all fine, but I wonder what grass the Wisconsin dairyman finds to feed his cows in the winter? Or did the writer just simplify and omit mention of "hay".  These cows are going to be less productive.  Yes, dairy cattle evolved to eat only grass.  But we've bred them to produce milk longer than needed by their calves and much more volume.  To sustain the production they need grain as well as forage.  

So micro-dairies are fine to provide a niche product marketed to gourmet types, those who have the money to spend on refined tastes, but they won't do anything for the environment.

U.S. Is Not a New Nation

Ron Charles includes this sentence in a review of a novel focused on Thomas Jefferson:

"We’re a young nation, and like any adolescent, nothing rouses us to fits of bitter delight more than detecting hypocrisy in others [i.e., Jefferson]."

I disagree.  You can define "nation" different ways.  One looks at the government and the land included in the nation, another at the "people", an approach which has lost favor.  (Hitler conflated the Reich and the German people.)

Nations like France, Italy, and Germany really were formed in the 19th century, as a government consolidated control over its territory.  "England" and "Britain" form something of an exception--England has been consolidated under the crown since the Norman Conquest, give or take the odd civil war.  Britain still isn't sure whether it includes the Scots or not.

There are nations which have been around in some form or other for centuries: China, Japan, Ethiopia. And if you allow for boundaries to change, Russia, Persia/Iran, Egypt, and others can qualify.  But when you look Latin America, Africa, Australia, and South and Southwest Asia you see the impact of colonialism and nationalism, recent phenomena.

So I repeat: we aren't a young nation, considering the histories of all the nations in the world.  The young nation meme is just a way to claim American exceptionalism.