When you think of Walmart, you probably think of cheap Chinese products and labor. But about two-thirds of the money Walmart spends to stock up its U.S. stores now goes for domestic products. That's because, over the last decade, Walmart has moved aggressively into the grocery sector, and most of our food items are grown and produced here in the U.S. Ten years ago, groceries made up less than 25 percent of the retail giant's sales; they now make up 55 percent. From CNN:

Experts say that this shift was no accident. The nation's largest retailer adapted to fit the needs of its cash-strapped customers in the midst of a slow economic recovery. Shoppers today are more concerned with buying basics like milk and bread than electronics and apparel, many of which are foreign-made, and the retailer is shifting focus to keep up.

"Consumers have been shopping more for 'needs' than for 'wants,' and that's why groceries are still the number one thing in their budgets," said Craig Johnson, president of independent consulting firm Customer Growth Partners. "In return, Wal-Mart has become a needs-oriented store."

Walmart's crushing the competition, with higher sales than Kroger, Safeway, and SuperValu grocery chains combined. Its house "Great Value" brand boasts the biggest sales of any food brand in the U.S. To assert its dominance in the grocery sector, Walmart "leverages its scale" so its suppliers can pay lower prices to farmers, as investing site Trefis reports -- which is bad news for small farmers across the country. Sure, god made a farmer, but god also made an American profit motive. From NPR's The Salt blog:

Wal-Mart claims its emphasis on local has saved customers over $1 billion while helping farmers. But Wyatt Fraas, of the Center for Rural Affairs in Lyon, Neb., would like to see those benefits and cost savings broken down.

Whoever is tallying the bill for Hurricane Sandy (Paul Ryan, maybe? Chris Christie?) needs to add another $400 million in the "expenses" column. That's how much New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) plans to spend to buy storm-damaged houses, raze them, and leave the land vacant.

From The New York Times:

The purchase program, which still requires approval from federal officials, would be among the most ambitious ever undertaken, not only in scale but also in how Mr. Cuomo would be using the money to begin reshaping coastal land use. Residents living in flood plains with homes that were significantly damaged would be offered the pre-storm value of their houses to relocate; those in even more vulnerable areas would be offered a bonus to sell; and in a small number of highly flood-prone areas, the state would double the bonus if an entire block of homeowners agreed to leave.

The land would never be built on again. Some properties could be turned into dunes, wetlands or other natural buffers that would help protect coastal communities from ferocious storms; other parcels could be combined and turned into public parkland.

When you live on a coastline, looking down the barrel of imminent and unstoppable rising sea levels, sometimes "managed retreat" is your only option. What if we rerouted the highways before they ever flooded?

That's the thinking behind San Francisco's Master Plan for the city's western shoreline. This retreat is not just managed, but proactive. KQED reports on the "test case" that other coastal cities will be watching: a more than $350 million plan to move the Great Highway and allow the surf to reclaim its turf.

"A lot of the things we're recommending at Ocean Beach are very expensive," says Benjamin Grant, who manages the Ocean Beach Master Plan for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR). "But you have to set them against the costs of the band-aid measures already taking place."

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) today unveiled a new energy plan, a document that she'd been hyping for weeks. In January, she called it "very comprehensive," which is, I guess, an improvement over other people's moderately comprehensive proposals.

Murkowski very savvily linked the release to the Super Bowl power outage, noting that the darkened Superdome "helps to perhaps kick-start the debate" over exactly how much offshore drilling we should do. Oh, that was a spoiler: Murkowski thinks we should do a lot of offshore drilling. And if we had, the Superdome wouldn't have gone dark last night, because the game could have been played by the light of burning barrels of crude.

So. The plan. Here's how the Anchorage Daily News describes it. (We've gone ahead and removed the filler.)

The most famous cliché of editorial advice -- “write what you know” -- has always served me in good stead. I've often regretted ill-advised ventures outside my areas of expertise. (In 2006 I wrote a screed complaining that critics over-rate Ghostface Killah, based on my deep knowledge of hip-hop circa 1997. And don’t ask me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Ever. Please.) Ed Glaeser, Harvard economist and author of Triumph of the City, has just made such a mistake. While Glaeser knows free-market economics, he clearly knows nothing about the people who live in cities.

In the current issue of City Journal -- house organ of Rudy Giuliani-style neoconservatism -- Glaeser contends that it is time for cities and Republicans to put aside their history of animosity and come together. He makes three arguments, each less true than the next: that Republicans would benefit politically from appealing to urbanites, that urbanites will be receptive to their entreaties, and that Republican policy ideas would substantively benefit cities. Glaeser writes:

The GOP has an urban problem. And it’s partly a self-created one. The party, nationally and even locally, has focused on winning suburban and rural votes and has stopped reaching out to city dwellers.

The cities-as-foreign-territory approach is bad politics for the Republicans: after all, successful cities like New York and Houston surge with ambitious strivers and entrepreneurs, who should instinctively sympathize with the GOP’s faith in private industry. The Republican move away from the cities is also bad for the cities themselves, which have hugely benefited -- and could benefit a lot more -- from right-of-center ideas.

Let’s take these assertions one at a time.

It really is an apt image: a series of briefcases, presumably in a range of colors from dusty brown to black, sitting in the freezing air on the steps of a North Dakota courthouse sometime before dawn. The briefcases served as proxies for the oil and gas company representatives jostling to buy mineral rights in the empty flatness of western North Dakota, representatives not eager enough to close the deals that they would stand in subzero temperatures.

This scene leads the New York Times Magazine's overview of the state's newest-but-not-only oil boom, the cacophonous hustle to split apart the Bakken shale with hydraulic fracturing. The Times has been on a North Dakota bender of late, covering gender issues and infrastructural strains caused by the boom. But this most recent piece provides the most insight on how the boom came to be and how long it might last.

They have been through this before, the people of North Dakota, first in the ’60s, a decade after oil was discovered in the state. And then again in the late ’70s, when the boom was driven by rising oil prices. Monthly oil production, which peaked in 1984 at 4.6 million barrels, fell to half and then went sideways for nearly a quarter-century. By February 1999, there wasn’t a single rig drilling new wells in the state, and oil development looked to be yet another cautionary tale in the familiar boom-and-bust history of the region ...

And then around seven years ago -- driven by technological refinements that have made North Dakota a premier laboratory for coaxing oil from stingy rocks -- the state’s Bakken boom began in Mountrail County. … The first areas of the Bakken to be hydraulically fractured were on the Montana side of the Williston Basin in the Elm Coulee Field, where oil was discovered in 2000. Early treatments there were called “Hail Mary fracks” because geologists and engineers would just drill a well, pump in frack fluid and pray for a robust result. The technique is more exact now. Certain grades of sand or sometimes proppant made of ceramic beads are matched to certain kinds of rock, and the wells are fracked in stages, as many as 40 stages per well.

Just how much oil is in the Bakken is still unknown. Estimates have been continuously revised upward since a 1974 figure of 10 billion barrels. Leigh Price, a United States Geological Survey geochemist, was initially greeted with skepticism when, about 13 years ago, he came to the conclusion that the Bakken might hold as much as 503 billion barrels of oil. Now people don’t think that number is as crazy as it seemed. …

[A]s the volume of oil in the Bakken shale is still a moving target, and recovery techniques are increasingly sophisticated, some estimates put the life of the Bakken play, and the attendant upheaval it is causing in North Dakota, at upward of a hundred years.

The Grist List position on dolphins has long been that they are adorable, playful, sweet-looking oversexed death machines. Whether they're killing porpoises because they haven't gotten laid in a while, or being trained for covert ops by the Ukrainian navy, or biting the shit out of a child, you should not be fooled by their happy faces -- and if you see this coming for you, RUN.

But lately we keep seeing stories about kind, selfless dolphins helping each other or other animals, and we are confused and scared. What happened to the "I will fucking cut you" dolphin of yore? Everyone knows dolphins will see the writing on the wall and abandon the planet before it gets destroyed (N.B. I am a humongous nerd) -- is that what all this good-deed shit is about, like they're on their way out and they can't muster the energy to be dicks anymore? Is this some kind of dolphin senioritis? Whatever it is, it's spooky.

For starters, here are some dolphins -- a species which, need I reiterate, likes to curb-stomp porpoises -- helping a confused and tired seal:

Dear public transit systems,

We love you. We defend you. We argue day and night that you're a superior option to cars in so many ways. We expect a lot of you, it's true. Which makes it so much harder when you let us down, like D.C.'s WMATA did when it left hundreds of passengers stranded underground for hours after a track fire stopped service. This account, published in the Atlantic Cities, makes it sound like a nightmare:

[We] were in the dark somewhere under the Anacostia River. Inside the temperature was close to 90 degrees. Most people managed to get their coats off, and in some cases, even shirts came off, I was dripping with sweat, but tried to keep breathing and conserve my energy and keep calm. I did not talk much, and kept my eyes closed while standing face to face and body to body with the other sweaty passengers.

About two and a half hours, someone threw up in our car. The car also smelt of urine. I’m certain more than one person had pissed themselves. The car smelt rank, and the situation was getting out of control. Multiple emergency doors were forced open, and now passengers were wondering around in the train tunnels in the dark.

It’s worth reading the rest, but, uh, maybe not until you’re done with your evening commute.

Farmers: We like them! So does Dodge, I guess, because there's not any other clear reason why the American car company would make this ad except to try to associate itself with a trade close to America's scrappy -- and white male -- identity.

From Dodge's portrayal, you'd hardly know that almost a third of farm operators are women, and the population of farm owners of color is growing by full percentage points each year. You'd also hardly know who does most of the work on most of those farms.

God made a farmer. Then god made thousands of field workers, approx. one of whom dies every day while working & making ~$10k/year. WTF god?

— Susie Cagle (@susie_c) February 4, 2013

My wife and I used to have an annoying neighbor. There were various ways in which he was annoying -- he would holler every Sunday during the Saints games and would stand outside talking on his cell phone at all hours of the night. But most annoying was the smoking. He'd stand under our bedroom windows and smoke, the smell drifting into our apartment. Of all of his infuriating tendencies, this was the worst.

But at least what wafted into our clothes and lungs while we slept wasn't toxic smog. That's the problem Japan is having with its neighbor to the west. From Agence France-Presse:

The suffocating smog that blanketed swathes of China is now hitting parts of Japan, sparking warnings Monday of health fears for the young and the sick.

The environment ministry's website has been overloaded as worried users log on to try to find out what is coming their way. ...

Air pollution over the west of Japan has exceeded government limits over the last few days, with tiny particulate matter a problem, said Atsushi Shimizu of the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES).

Prevailing winds from the west bring airborne particles from the Asian mainland, he said.