I think a lot of us have had the suspicion that the idea that everyone should eat only local, organic food is unrealistic not just in a “not going to happen” sense but in a very strong “wouldn’t actually be possible” sense. Paul Roberts in a great Mother Jones article about what sustainable agriculture would really entail gets the numbers:

In fact, most of the familiar candidates for alternative food would have trouble operating on the kind of scale necessary for a world of 6.7 billion people. Consider what it would take to make our farm system entirely organic. The only reason industrial organic agriculture can get away with replenishing its soils with manure or by planting nitrogen-fixing cover crops is that the industry is so tiny—making up less than 3 percent of the US food supply (and just 5.3 percent even in gung-ho green cultures like Austria’s). If we wanted to rid the world of synthetic fertilizer use—and assuming dietary habits remain constant—the extra land we’d need for cover crops or forage (to feed the animals to make the manure) would more than double, possibly triple, the current area of farmland, according to Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist at the University of Manitoba. Such an expansion, Smil notes, “would require complete elimination of all tropical rainforests, conversion of a large part of tropical and subtropical grasslands to cropland, and the return of a substantial share of the labor force to field farming—making this clearly only a theoretical notion.”

Now a couple of things on the plus side. There’s pretty ample reason to believe that it would be desirable for dietary habits to not “remain constant.” Americans, and other big-time meat consumers, seem to eat substantially more meat than is healthy for us. A switch to a dynamic in which less meat is eaten, but meat-dollars are held constant so that you get less of a higher-quality product, would be tastier and healthier and move in the direction of sustainability. At the same time, most people aren’t Americans. If the billions of extremely poor people on the planet become less poor (which we should certainly hope for) they’ll want to eat somewhat more meat. So you’re still left with the same basic dilemma.

Roberts has some ideas for more realistic paths to sustainability. But it’s worth highlighting just one insight, namely that one problem with the current organic paradigm is that it’s an all-or-nothing proposition. No-till farming, which Roberts explores, has some substantial environmental benefits over conventional methods including a substantial reduction in the use of artificial herbicides. But because it doesn’t reduce herbicide use to zero it doesn’t qualify as “organic.” Consequently, the current market set-up doesn’t provide any real reward from switching from a less-sustainable to a more-sustainable model.

That kind of focus on all-or-nothing issues reflects organic farming’s origins in quasi-mystical movements and it suits the business model of the “Big Organic” enterprises that have sprung up in recent years. But sound public policy is usually all about impacts at the margin. Doubling the proportion of the U.S. food supply that comes from organic sources would still leave us with 94 percent coming from conventional farms. You would accomplish much more by policies that produce a mild reduction in the ecological footprint of the entire conventional center.

Another good post from James Fallows on the Chas Freeman issue. A taste:

The two people whose views I quote below have absolutely unquestionable standing to speak on this subject. One is Sidney Rittenberg, who first went to China with the US Army in 1945 and end up spending 35 years there, 16 of them in solitary confinement for alleged espionage and disloyalty to the Mao regime. The other is Jerome A. Cohen, of NYU Law School and Paul Weiss, who has been tireless in his efforts for legal reform in China and was instrumental in freeing John Downey, who had been held in Chinese prison for two decades after the Korean War.

Both of them strongly support the expansion of individual liberties and civil society in China. Both of them strongly support Chas Freeman and his candidacy for his now-disupted job.

You’ll have to click the link to read the actual letters. Then see Josh Marshall on this. Josh has personal beef with Freeman over an unrelated issue that led Freeman to tag him as a purveyor of “slime journalism.” But also says that “the whole effort strikes me as little more than a thuggish effort to keep the already too-constricted terms of debate over the Middle East and Israel/Palestine locked down and largely one-sided.” You can see Andrew Sullivan’s timeline for more on this.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein observes that whether or not Freeman gets the job in the end, the message has been sent:

But for Freeman’s detractors, a loss might still be a win. As Sullivan and others have documented, the controversy over Freeman is fundamentally a question of his views on Israel. Barring a bad report from the inspector general, Chas Freeman will survive and serve. But only because his appointment doesn’t require Senate confirmation. Few, however, will want to follow where he led. Freeman’s career will likely top out at Director of the NIC. That’s not a bad summit by any means. But for ambitious foreign policy thinkers who might one day aspire to serve in a confirmed capacity, the lesson is clear: Israel is off-limits. And so, paradoxically, the freethinking Freeman’s appointment might do quite a bit to silence foreign policy dissenters who want to succeed in Washington.

Still, I would say that would-be government officials have already internalized the lesson that drawing outside the lines on the Arab-Israeli conflict is not the way to get jobs. But the Obama administration has already put in place quite a few officials—James Jones, Samantha Power, George Mitchell—who didn’t exactly come with the kosher stamp of approval.

Gene Weingarten reports for the Washington Post on the terrifying and horrible case of Miles Harrison:

The charge in the courtroom was manslaughter, brought by the Commonwealth of Virginia. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer — beset by problems at work, making call after call on his cellphone — he forgot to drop his son, Chase, at day care. The toddler slowly sweltered to death, strapped into a car seat for nearly nine hours in an office parking lot in Herndon in the blistering heat of July.

It was an inexplicable, inexcusable mistake, but was it a crime? That was the question for a judge to decide.

I’m not sure this is the only perspective with which to look at a case like this, but rather than asking if it “was” a crime, one might ask what one thinks could be accomplished by hitting Harrison with criminal sanctions. Do we fear that there’ll be an upswing in this sort of thing if people think they can get away with accidentally killing their children? That doesn’t seem right to me. If the issue is a belief that it’s not really an accident, that’s one thing. But if not, then I don’t see how jail time would make a horrible situation any less horrible.

I think it’s reasonable well-understood at this point among non-stupid, non-dishonest people that “earmarks” are a minor aspect of the budget and the bloviating about them is just hot air not serious budget policy. Less well-understood is Stan Collender’s point that earmark reform would literally save no money whatsoever:

Lost in all of the debate (and the reporting about the debate) on the earmarks in the omnibus 2009 appropriations bill the Senate is still working to adopt is the basic fact that cutting earmarks doesn’t save any money.

This is not open for discussion. An earmark simply is a congressional decision to allocate part of appropriation for a particular purpose. Eliminating the allocation doesn’t reduce the appropriation, it simply leaves the allocation decision to a federal department or agency rather than to Congress.

A lot of people don’t understand this because the mechanics of the federal budget process are fairly obscure. But guess who really ought to understand the federal budget process? Members of congress! And especially those members of congress who portray themselves as incredibly concerned with the need for federal budget reform. I’m looking at you John McCain!