Here’s a provocative post from Felix Salmon on why local self-sufficiency is preferable to free trade in the context of agricultural production.
Will writes from Washington, D.C. (well, Arlington, Virginia). You can reach him at willblogcorrespondence at gmail dot com.
Burt Likko Fantasti*con! You're going to have another customer soon.
Mary Fantasti*con! How exciting! Congrats!
James K Saturday! I've started on Kingdoms of Amalur, I don't think I...
Jaybird Fantasti*con! Good luck, teacher!
Tod Kelly The Contraception Compromise This is a pretty fabulous question, Burt, that I ha...
Katherine Sunday! I have been wasting vast amount of time watching "I...
Will Truman Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 14 There is a remarkable lack of symmetry in his examp... Will Truman Clearing Out The Clippings, No. 16 I suck at doing what he says we do...
Kyle Cupp A Child, a Death, and a Memory Thank you all for the kind words. Burt Likko A Child, a Death, and a Memory What an awful experience for you and your wife. Wha...Borat, Art, and the Eye of the Beholder
Borat: “I do a picture, only small, of the Tishnik Masacre. Where many Uzbeks…crushed!”
Kindly Gray Hippie: “How did you feel when you drew this?”
Borat: “Very proud!”.
KGH: “I am just listening with sadness…sadness for your people…?”
Borat: “Yes…no, it is not sad. It is us who do the kill!”
When in doubt, consult the classics [5:30 mark].
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Over on the Mindless Diversions site...
Our intrepid commenter A Teacher tells the story of how he published his NaNoWriMo book (and, of course, tells us how we can get a copy of it for ourselves). ( 0 comments)
Nobel Peace Prize Jury Faces Formal Inquiry
Read the story here. Here’s the paragraph that would make clicking through worthwhile, if you’re still undecided:
If the Stockholm County Administrative Board, which supervises foundations in Sweden’s capital, finds that prize founder Alfred Nobel’s will is not being honored, it has the authority to suspend award decisions going back three years — though that would be unlikely and unprecedented, said Mikael Wiman, a legal expert working for the county. ( 7 comments)
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I’m struggling to take him seriously. That he brings up the 2009 commodities chrisis as an indictment of global food markets but conveniently forgets to mention how biofuels were strongly responsible for that particular event (biofuels being a child of his own pet global warming concerns) makes it hard for me to take him seriously.
Politically speaking, they were actually a child of the oil shocks in the 70s, back when people were still worried about global cooling. Now they’re a child of rural interest group politics. Beyond the recycling of waste oils, biofuels are actually worse for global warming than petroleum-based fuels, due to land-clearing and fuel use associated with farming them.
He has interesting points, but I am skeptical, too. Why does large scale production have to equal monoculture? It might lead in that direction, but wouldn’t it be POSSIBLE for Ohio to grow more than one strain of soybean, and still reap the economies of scale associated with Big Ag? WalMart can sell more than one brand of toaster. Toyota can make a car and a truck. Why can’t the ADM subsidiary here or there diversify? There might be reasons not to, and it might not be easy to make it happen. But going local for your legume needs isn’t necessarily easy either.
And this: “Because the cash-crop model, as we’ve seen many times, is far too prone to disastrous failure.”
Well, the subsistence model has been known to fail from time to time, too. As has every other model. And sure, we had the tomato blight. But nobody starved because of it.
I just wonder where the localism ends. And it’s usually at a level of taste or aesthetics. Of course we should not import asparagus out of season, says the guy who drinks Columbian coffee in the morning and Australian Shiraz with dinner.
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