Robots in Everything

DOD has its first robot ship.

Farmers are building their own.

Tulips in Holland, Roses in Colombia, Peonies in Alaska?

Modern Farmer explains why growing peonies for export to the lower 48 is becoming big business in Alaska.

Biggest Defense Budgets

According to a Times piece on our Middle East policy, specifically Saudi Arabia:

1. United States
2. China
3. Saudi Arabia
4. Russia

Yglesias and Jacobin Are Both Wrong

Matt Yglesias tweeted that this paragraph in a Jacobin article attacking incremental liberalism is mostly right.

The simple truth is that virtually every significant and lasting progressive achievement of the past hundred years was achieved not by patient, responsible gradualism, but through brief flurries of bold action. The Second New Deal in 1935–36 and Civil Rights and the Great Society in 1964–65 are the outstanding examples, but the more ambiguous victories of the Obama era fit the pattern, too.

The writer is sly, setting himself up to deny the "significance" of any achievement which was achieved by "gradualism", with the  fallback position of "virtually". Incrementalism often works by getting a piece of the pie now, another in a few years, so the argument is weighted. And the examples suggest that only legislative achievements count.  Wrong again.

One hundred years goes back to 1916, so here goes:

• Nineteenth Amendment (women's suffrage) 1919
• Brown versus Board of Education 1954  (the greatest example of incremental progress by liberals)
• Twenty-Fourth Amendment (poll tax) 1962 (so long a battle the ultimate victory became meaningless)
• Americans with Disability Act 1990
• federal aid to education (a long battle beginning in the 1950's to establish the principle and expand the pot)
• Equal Rights Amendment (a battle in which liberals were defeated, but the victory is being won incrementally)
• gay rights.
• Medicare, Part D, and CHIPS.

 More time to think would yield more examples.

IMHO what's right is this: sometimes liberals/progressives win victories by slow and patient work; sometimes we win victories by a breakthrough, a popular movement.  And sometimes we "win" something history shows was the wrong way to go.  Does anyone remember the progressive cause: public power, building hydroelectric dams? 

[Updated: Kevin Drum seems to take a similar position here. ]

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.