NOT EVERYONE IS optimistic about Greece.

ON FEBRUARY 14, SHOW STARBUCKS A LITTLE EXTRA LOVE.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Beyond Blue Part Four: Better Living in the 21st Century. “It’s the pain of these personal setbacks and others like them plus a general sense that the strategies that used to work don’t work anymore that is behind much of the pessimism around us. This is real and it shouldn’t be denied or passed over in silence. But to see where the country as a whole is going, and to develop strategies both for general policy changes and for new personal strategies, we have to look beyond the pain: just as Americans in the last century had to look beyond the collapse of the family farm to see the big picture.”

AT AMAZON, it’s the Jewelry clearance.

CHANGE: Less than two months after American troops left, the State Department is preparing to slash by as much as half the enormous diplomatic presence it had planned for Iraq, a sharp sign of declining American influence in the country.

This must be more of that “smart diplomacy” we were promised.

TEN YEARS IN PRISON FOR SUDAFED? “Tough break. That’s 2 to 10 years. Should have committed armed robbery. The average sentence is 2 to 6 months for that in West Virginia.”

HALFTIME IN AMERICA: IowaHawk: A Fistful Of Rebates.

WHAT THEY DON’T TEACH YOU on HGTV.

DAN ABRAMS: The Media’s Shameful, Inexcusable Distortion Of The Supreme Court’s Citizens United Decision. “You may disagree with the opinion, you may think that expanding the ability of corporations to fund campaign messaging is a true danger, or just, as I do, that outside money is a major concern for our democratic system. But that doesn’t change the fact that the political chattering set ought to be far more concerned and outraged by the indolence, indifference or just bias, that has led to the widespread misinformation by the media about what the court actually considered and ultimately ruled.” In other words, it’s of a piece with a lot of their work.

RAND SIMBERG: The Space Speech That Newt Needs To Give.

UPDATE: Roger Simon: The Santorum Surprise.

SIX WAYS THE JOB MARKET HAS CHANGED, post-recession.

#OBAMAFAIL: White House struggles to contain uproar over birth-control mandate. Interestingly, a number of my University colleagues who are Catholic but not particularly conservative at all are nonetheless quite unhappy with this. If he’s having trouble with academics, he’s probably having bigger trouble elsewhere.

ED MORRISSEY: Right-to-Work Revolution Takes on Big Labor. But it’s the public-sector unions that really need to be rolled back.

CHANGE: Gas prices to spike 60 cents by May. Tank up!

THAT’S QUITE DISTURBING IN SUCH A NEW FLEET: European safety regulators have ordered inspections of the entire fleet of A380 superjumbos after initial checks revealed cracks inside the wings.

CHANGE: Oh my: Majorities of liberal Democrats now support drone strikes, keeping Gitmo open.

It’s as if all that international-law, humanitarian, have-you-no-decency crap was just . . . crap. And partisan crap at that.

No secret, but nice to make it clear. To all the people who were yammering about this in 2007-2008: Don’t waste my time in the future. Or yours.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: PayPal Founder Talks Technology.

Thiel argued that innovation in fields such as agriculture and transportation has become dangerously slow, leading to economic stagnation around the world.

“I think that we’ve seen progress in the virtual world, but not in the world of stuff,” Thiel said. “The U.S. has produced a ton of innovation in computers and finance over the past 30 years, but we have to ask if that implicitly twisted innovation in other areas.”

Thiel attributed this lack of innovation to structural defects in politics and education today.

Read the whole thing. My next Popular Mechanics column addresses a related theme.

UPDATE: Farmer-reader Bart Hall objects strenuously:

No innovation in agriculture? In my three decades as a farmer and agronomist the changes have been utterly remarkable and nearly all for the better. Take just a few examples … thirty years ago most agricultural pesticides persisted many years in the soil and required something like 3 or 4 pounds of the active material per acre. New pesticides are often effective at rates of an ounce per acre or less and are non-persistent. A number of new insecticides aren’t even poisons at all but hormones which disrupt the target pest’s life cycle.

Precision-guidance systems have led to a 6% increase in vegetable yields, simply by eliminating space previously wasted when growers worked just a bit wide to avoid overlaps. Other guidance systems allow close mechanical cultivation of vegetable rows, mostly eliminating the need for herbicides. Many new vegetable varieties have much more disease resistance, producing better yields with fewer pesticides. The Japanese developped greenhouse coverings which exclude the specific wavelengths of light needed by mildews to infect the crop.

Breeders produced high-Vitamin-A rice to reduce blindness in the developping world. They’re working on incorporating oral vaccines into specially-colored bananas; no refrigeration necessary. We’re now able to evaluate grassland health and productivity from space. New, tastier, and more nutritious varieties of fruit are being developped regularly around the world — remember the old pineapples? New machinery for no-stoop harvest of salad mixes at an affordable price.

The list could go on for a long time, but this ought to be enough to illustrate Thiel’s egregious ignorance of agriculture. Unfortunately I could do the same for at least three other important domains of “stuff” — minerals, energy, and forestry. What’s especially clear is that Thiel has almost no understanding of “stuff” except helping people pay for it.

Note: My forthcoming column says nothing about farms.

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE: The Himalayas and nearby peaks have lost no ice in past 10 years, study shows. “The world’s greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows. The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.”

JIM GERAGHTY: Did Obama’s Election Feed The Resentment of the Unsuccessful? “Looking beyond who is hired and fired, the more activist federal government we’ve witnessed during the downturn sometimes seems to turn the definition of merit on its head.”

Related thoughts here.

LIGHTSQUARED UPDATE: Transportation official: LightSquared ‘not compatible’ with flight-safety devices. “He told lawmakers on the House Transportation and Infrastructure’s subcommittee on Aviation that LightSquared would disrupt GPS systems that pilots use to help them navigate in low altitudes, including devices that warn them when they are getting too close to terrain. Porcari said the Federal Aviation Administration has spent $2 million testing LightSquared’s network. He called spending that amount of money to review a private company ‘quite unusual.'” But the White House was very interested.

TEN YEARS AGO ON INSTAPUNDIT: To Congressmen Who Got Enron Donations: “Perhaps we should compare the honesty of the federal government’s accounting procedures with Enron’s, congressman?” More apt than I knew at the time . . . .

CPAC: GOProud Expands Mission with Message: ‘We’re Truly Conservatives.’ “As CPAC gathers in Washington, the gay Republican group puts its focus on unity to defeat President Obama.”

RUSSIAN SCIENTISTS bore into ancient Antarctic lake. “The need to prevent even the slightest contamination of the lake is acute. Its environment is comparable to conditions on the moons of Jupiter, which are among the candidates for extraterrestrial life. If life exists in Vostok, it may well exist on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, which has subsurface icy water. The water in Vostok stays liquid because of the pressure and the warmth of the earth below it.”

AT AMAZON, coupons galore.

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF marriage in America.

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