Gar Alperovitz at MIT

Early last month:


Some other recent videos:

NPR: Paleo Diet Echoes Physical Culture Movement Of Yesteryear
Some discussion at Free the Animal.

Mark Sisson, BA and Robb Wolf, BS — Paleo Primal Q & A — AHS12


Debunking The Paleo Diet: A Wolf’s Eye View

A Girl and a Gun

Trailer via AICN -


website

Does the Silence Mean Something

Vatican Silent on John Paul II’s Cause for Canonization (3192)
Despite reports that medical personnel at the Holy See have approved a new miracle, the postulator of the cause won’t comment on the matter.

I am thinking of the speculation on Benedict XVI's resignation advanced by Christopher Ferrara.

Oakland Has a New Bishop

A Jesuit! A resurgence in the order or a last gasp? Fr. Michael Barber, SJ named new bishop of Oakland - Diocese of Oakland - press conference.

Cal Catholic Daily

Kathy Kallick Band!

While I was a the KKB concert I overhead some grayheads talking - the wife(?) was telling her husband that she had met
several women this week who had daughters who were having children young - 20 or 21. "How could they do that, and not have a life first?"
The husband expressed his agreement with his wife's statement - a coward or a true believer? With age comes experience but not necessarily wisdom. And when the elderly lack right opinion in moral matters, in addition to wisdom, how can they not be disdained? PDU - pretty d*** useless.

Let's Bring Manufacturing Home

NPR: Ethical Fashion: Is The Tragedy In Bangladesh A Final Straw?

Peter Hitchens on Robert Graves's Goodbye to All That

Goodbye to All That

And then he turned his mind to the War. I suspect that Graves was genuinely physically brave, though not very conscious of it, in a way that many more people used to be. His description of his own very severe wound is either conscious and deliberate understatement or an example of the old-fashioned Protestant stoicism which we were all once taught to observe, but which has largely disappeared in the modern world. I suspect it is the latter. He seems genuinely not to have minded going out on near-suicidal missions between the front lines, and, while he muses on the chances of him being reduced by the grind and fear of war to a shaking wreck with soiled trousers, it didn’t happen to him( as it did to many strong and upright men). Though if he had not been so badly wounded, who knows? So-called shell shock was a great destroyer of minds, and there were, in my childhood, many mental hospitals where its worst victims were still said to lie, trembling and staring, never to recover from the horror of the trenches.

Graves, brought up in the Edwardian English upper middle classes, just seems to have assumed that this is what he was supposed to be. The description he gives of warfare is all the better for being so detached. It is plain from what he says that the generals were largely clueless, the quality of troops very variable, the Germans in general very effective fighters, the waste of life appalling, the conditions verging on the unspeakable. It is also plain that his eventual weariness with the war (like Siegfried Sassoon’s) was not in any way motivated by pacifism or any other sot of left-wing dogma. There’s a wonderful account of a conversation with Bertrand Russell at Garsington, in which he shocks Russell quite badly by explaining the true attitudes of the men serving under him.

Beautiful Mosaics

The Basilica of Monreal - Monreale Welcomes New Archbishop.

Due to the Byzantine influence in Sicily?

How Much Info to Share Online?

TED: Juan Enriquez: Your online life, permanent as a tattoo


Very little; maybe none for some people.

KoreAm: Korean Americans Oppose Gay Marriage More Than Any Asian Group, Survey Says

I expect plenty of clucking by young Korean-Americans at those poor, old-fashioned, ignorant bigots.

Chris Nelder Responds to Charles Mann

Are Methane Hydrates Really Going to Change Geopolitics? by Chris Nelder

(Mann's article)

Rome Reports: Pope Francis asks that Church be joyful and positive community


Related:
Whispers in the Loggia: B16 Returns

Rome Reports: Pope welcomes Benedict XVI to the Vatican


Zenit: Pope Francis' Reform

Some Sad News at Home

Remembering Father Mark Catalana, late Pastor of Saint Thomas of Canterbury Parish
SPS

Kyrie eleison.

Steve Kopits on Peak Oil

Commentary: Interview with Steve Kopits

Kopits: Well, if you look at their capex plans then you see that Shell, BP, Total, Exxon and Hess are all cutting their upstream spend in their 2013-2017 plans going forward. Only Chevron is raising theirs, and only modestly. So in a world where we are struggling to increase global oil supply and the price itself remains high, the major oil companies are in fact beginning to carve back on their exploration and production investments. It’s capex compression.

In the West, the new evangelization and renewal of the local Church must involve the renewal of communal life in the parishes. This cannot happen until a proper and concerted response to the modern nation-state, and the political economy upon which it is built, especially its gradually assumed dependence upon cheap energy, is undertaken by Christians - I believe this response will include a movement towards voluntary simplicity.

Shopping Our Way to Sustainability - Really?
Ready for Rationing? Why We Should Put the Brakes on Consumption If We Want to Survive
Mutual Aid Medical Care

The Church Scandal Takes Its Toll

Abuse Scandal Casts a Shadow on a Candidate for Beatification - Fr. John Hardon, S.J.

One More for the Medieval Geek

The classical trivium: the place of Thomas Nashe in the learning of his time by Marshall McLuhan (his Ph.D. dissertation)

Someone posted a link to an essay which referenced McLuhan in its discussion of the trivium and how various authors differed as to the importance of rhetoric. I wasn't sure if I could find the link again, but I did - Thinking Trivially about Radical Orthodoxy. I had forgotten McLuhan had converted to Catholicism.

eighth day books blog

Peter Hitchens on May Day and His Time in Moscow

May Day Reflections on Moscow, Useless Tories and UKIP

So, in a few short months I had learned a new language, been knowingly suborned by a spy, experienced the underside of one of the world’s greatest cities, until recently largely closed to foreigners, learned how to bribe officials, uprooted myself from the land of my upbringing and education (though not, oddly enough, of my birth) and discovered the absolute falsehood of the USSR’s claims to be an equal society, by being lapped in greater and more exclusive privilege than I have ever known, before or since.

This sort of thing has many effects (there’s much more I could tell, but no time to tell it) but one of the main ones is that it sets your mind free to think for itself in a way that 50 years of living in the same place will not usually do.

But how do I communicate this intensified and enhanced understanding to others, who have not been so blessed? Last night I was in York , haranguing a mainly student audience on the need to destroy the Conservative Party (the York student Tories, to their credit, kindly organised this event, and were extremely hospitable to me).

One of the things I need to explain is that socialists and communists have not stopped thinking. They have not ignored the failures of the 1917 revolution, nor the dead end of Attlee’s nationalisation programme. They have regrouped, re-examined the battlefield, turned to other things. The fact that your opponent is no longer trying to nationalise industry, and the fact that the old Bolshevik-influenced Communist Parties are one with Nineveh and Tyre, does not mean that the revolutionaries have gone away.

It just means that, following Antonio Gramsci or Herbert Marcuse ( or Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland) they have learned new ways to the old goal of the utopian society. The union barons are a spent force, a stage army of more use to Tory propagandists than to their own side. The battle has shifted into sex, marriage, morality, comedy, drugs, rock and roll, the abolition of personal responsibility, the spread of egalitarian and diversity dogma in schools, the civil service, the law, universities, publishing, broadcasting and the NHS, the anti-Christian frenzy, and the attack on national sovereignty.

The ‘Internationale’, old anthem of Communism, is now just a sentimental recognition of a revolutionary youth. The real anthem of the new revolution is John Lennon’s ghastly ‘Imagine’ , a version of which I heard this morning leaking out of the loudspeakers in my York hotel, part of the background noise of our age, sneaking into our minds as an ear-worm.

A piece over at the Guardian on sustainability and capitalism -
The future of business: what are the alternatives to capitalism?
Jules Peck asks what the implications of limits to growth are for capitalist theory, the alternatives, and what it means for business

Mark Sisson on the Importance of Sleep

How to Get Fitter, Faster, and Stronger with Quality Sleep

See also: Crawling, Balancing, Rolling: The Importance of Practicing Natural Movements
Dear Mark: Protein for Pregnancy and Nursing, Reversing Sun Damage, Inflammatory Eggs

Feast of St. Joseph the Worker

CWR: Full text: Pope Francis’ Wednesday Audience address on the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker
“Work is fundamental to the dignity of a person.”

Andre Provost icon
Saint Joseph the Worker, Man of Faith and Prayer by Pope John Paul II
WFF

BBC2: Dido - Thank You (Later Archive 2000)

CWR Interview with Fr. Taft

CWR: Building Bridges Between Orthodox and Catholic Christians by Christopher B. Warner
An interview with Archimandrite Robert Taft, SJ, prominent Byzantine liturgical theologian and lifelong healer of Christian relations between East and West

Leslie Cheung - Si Shui Liu Nian (似水流年)


Kyrie eleison.

Old Crow Medicine Show on Conan

Old Crow Medicine Show "Mississippi Saturday Night" 04/29/13


The band will be in NoCal at the end of June.

CWR: The Death of China’s Most Famous & Powerful Bishop by Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D.
The enigmatic Bishop Aloysius Jin Luxian, SJ of Shanghai described himself as “both a serpent and a dove.”

(via Insight Scoop)

Related:
Msgr. Aloysius Jin Luxian, official bishop of Shanghai, has died
Msgr. Jin Luxian’s funeral without Bishop Ma Daqin
Archbishop Savio Hon: I pray for Mgr Jin Luxian and I hope to go to his funeral

Joe Le Taxi

Vanessa Paradis Joe Le Taxi




Japanese cover...


Priscilla Chan


A more recent cover

Bear Grylls Has a New Show, Get Out Alive

Coming this summer to NBC. It's a reality show with teams roughing it and competing for a prive.

Bear Grylls returns with NBC adventure series
Bear Grylls, NBC Team For 'Get Out Alive' Reality Series

I don't see him becoming a MR spokesman, but he can still be a model of masculinity in some aspects.

More of Bear Grylls:

Robb Wolf on the Sustainability of the Paleo Diet

Tackling the Paleo-Sustainability Argument

BBC: Hannah Fisher - Beached and Basking

BBC Radio Scotland's Young Traditional Musician 2013. (another webpage)

Also: Alamire performs Byrd's Emendemus in melius

Chris Kresser Reviews Gather

Here - Gather, the Art of Paleo Entertaining

Leon Hadar on Immigration and American Identity

What Does It Mean to Be an American?
Why the immigration debate should be about language and culture more than jobs—and not just race.

Yet it sounds to me like a lot of wishful thinking on the part of some pro-immigration advocates to dismiss the concerns raised by critics about the difficulties in integrating Mexican and other Hispanic illegal and legal immigrants into the national-cultural fabric of American life. You have to be deaf (“For English press 1″) or a bit deluded to dismiss the growing signs of an evolving bilingual America—represented by a split between “Anglos” and “Latinos”—by arguing that, well, it wasn’t so different with the early waves of Italian immigrants.

But there were not millions of Italians living across our border, and the immigrants from Italy were not exposed to 24/7 Italian-language cable television channels and other means of communication that would have helped create or strengthen a sense of cultural separatism. And unlike in the multicultural America of the early 21st century, America during the early 20th century still maintained a strong sense of a national identity that helped assimilate foreign immigrants into the American cultural milieu to which they ended up making their own contributions.

It’s therefore too bad that much of the criticism of immigration on the political right has been dominated by the never-ending preoccupation with building a fence, as well as derogatory remarks about immigrants and foreigners. The discourse has taken a somewhat xenophobic flavor that has antagonized even members of the Asian-American community who, as I argued in another post, are natural political allies of the Republican Party. It has helped create the impression that conservatives are racists and Republicans are nativists who don’t like immigrants who don’t look like them.

Ecclesial Darwinism

A positive assessment in this vein: Viewpoint: In the War Over Christianity, Orthodoxy Is Winning by Mary Eberstadt

Without the Holy Spirit, what Christian sect can be sustained over the long run? Why bother with watered-down Christianity or some heretical version if God approves of anything you do? Wouldn't that also include neglecting Him, if not rejecting Him outright?

Michael Bublé Sings in NYC Subway

Lost in Translation?

Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven does contain certain themes taken from Protestant Christianity; without an understanding of that, it may be difficult to understand William Munny's character, his motivations and reactions.

What is the theology behind the Japanese remake? Perhaps Ken Watanabe's samurai character becomes a Buddhist and decides to 'atone' for his sins; but he doesn't become a monk, which is usually how this is depicted. The Japanese story seems like it is about a "retired" samurai or a ronin who must decide whether to give way to the new industrial age or if he will fight to defend others or for the sake of honor?

Second Teaser For Japanese Remake Of Eastwood's UNFORGIVEN

While doing a search, I found this post by Peter T. Chattaway at Patheos: Unforgiven, samurai remakes, and subverted Christ figures.

Related:
The Gospel of Violent Zeal in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven
"It's a Hell of a Thing to Kill a Man": Western Manhood in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven

The "Letting the Problems Die Off" Strategy

Which I mentioned here - there is this article in the NCReg: The Era of Dissidence is Nearly Over.

But will the era of comfortable, bourgeois Christianity remain?

Is this the last gasp? Head of German bishops’ conference says the idea of women deacons “no longer taboo”

But My Preference This Week...

The Kathy Kallick Band (including, of course, Annie Staninec) at The Woodshed in Los Gatos on Friday, at 7:30 P.M.

The Infamous Stringdusters in NoCal This Week

The group's website - FB

Santa Cruz: The Rio Theater, Thursday, May 2, 2013 at 8:00 P.M.

San Rafael: Terrapin Crossroads, Friday, May 3, 2013 at 7:00 P.M.

San Francisco: Great American Music Hall on Saturday, May 4 at 9 P.M. (tickets)

Sacramento: Harlow's Restaurant and Night Club, Tuesday, May 7, 2013 at 8:00 P.M.











Also in the area: Cowboy Junkies - Napa Valley Opera House on Wednesday, Yoshi's SF on Thursday, Carriage House Theatre at Montalvo Arts Center on Friday, Rio Theater on Saturday.

Apropos of this post - Is Chant Like Folk Music?
by Jeffrey Tucker

Makes me want to read a more scholarly treatment and history of Gregorian chant, so as to see if it had anything in common with other singing traditions in the classical/Mediterranean world.

SFEMS Announces Its 37th Season

2013-2014

Another Movie Adaptation of Macbeth

This time with Michael Fassbender...

Snowtown's Justin Kurzel to Direct Michael Fassbender in Macbeth
Michael Fassbender to Play Macbeth

Larry Vickers Coming to the Area

Castro Valley, specifically, May 20-21. His 2013 schedule.





ARMATI SG 553 TAC TV Larry Vickers LOW-RES MOBILE FRIENDLY
TAC-TV's Full Length Wilson Combat Episode

The only true metric of energy abundance: The rate of flow by Kurt Cobb

Kickin out the Footlights - George Jones and Merle Haggard

Been busy as family was in town. One of the nieces was sick yesterday, too.