Items of Interest, 8 February 2012

Robert M. Peters, First Principles

Mark T. Mitchell, Conservative in America

Conservatism at Its Highest

John Taylor of Caroline: The American Cato by Brittany Baldwin

Wendell Berry to Give 2012 Jefferson Lecture (Rod Dreher and FPR)

Daniel Larison, Romney and Santorum on Foreign Policy

Buchanan's Revolution

Daniel McCarthy, Is Santorum Buchanan 2.0?

Thomas Fleming, Adolf Assad

Why Edmund Burke is Studied
The Conservative Movement, Then and Now

Rod Dreher, Social Conservatives & the Politics of Now

Tom Engelhardt, Kicking Down the World's Door

Chinese Fascism's Global Consequences

Iran:
Fabius MaximusIran: War Drums Beating
Patrick Buchanan, Iran, War or Peace?
US Oblivious to Unintended Consequences of Foreign Policy by Ivan Eland
Paul Craig Roberts, Will Iran be Attacked?

Localism:
Robb's 27 Rules for Global Guerrillas
Seeing Berry’s Wilderness again by Chris Chaney (EB)
Community supported agriculture by John McKay (EB)
How do we build local social capital? by Dave Pollard (EB)

Mad City Chickens - trailer #3 from Tarazod Films on Vimeo.

Documentary
Madison, Wisconsin

Economics:
Is There Such A Thing As Ethical Capitalism? by Kerry-anne Mendoza (EB)
More on the job numbers--Michael Shedlock and Paul Craig Roberts.
Growth and free trade: Brain-dead dogmas still kicking hard by Herman Daly (EB)

Energy and Peak Oil:
OutThere Monthly - Interview with Richard Heinberg
Peak Oil Debate Continues
What is energy for? by Rebecca Willis (EB)
Arthur E. Berman, Petroleum Geologist: Magical Thinking and Fracking by James Howard Kunstler (EB)

Christian:
Rorate Caeli: A new Traditional monastery of Benedictine spirituality in France
Rod Dreher, Cardinal Egan Cracking Up

That article on French parenting: Why French Parents Are Superior

Music:
Today's Country: Rhonda Vincent
NYC: Upcoming performance by St. Vlad's Chorale (May 7, 2012)

Exploring Bay Area's hidden country music scene

Steve Martin Throws Down the Gauntlet

Feminism:
APNewsBreak: Sources: New military roles for women
What happened to downsizing the military? Are there not enough qualified men for these roles that women have to be allowed? But of course, everything must be thrown open to women, so that they can advance their careers.

Equal opportunity launchers of mass nuclear death
Insert a jokes about the synchronization of cycles and the end of the world...

Historical All-Female Flight Takes Place Aboard USS Carl Vinson

Without women there is no food sovereignty by Esther Vivas (EB)

Ending "Farmer's Wife" Syndrome by Sharon Astyk

Misc:
Tim Kennedy gives it to us straight about Iran, his duty as a sniper and retiring from MMA

Items of Interest, 21 October 2011

Vandana Shiva: "People should see that corporations have abandoned them long ago."


Rob Hopkins, Does Transition build happiness? An article from the latest Resurgence magazine. (pdf)
Economic Solutions Worth Spreading
The Empowerment Manual
A Conversation with Helena Norberg-Hodge, Part II
How Can We Rouse Police and Other Protectors of the Corporatocracy -- "Guards" of the Status Quo -- to Join the OWS Rebellion?

Tom Engelhardt, Bailing out the Complex

PJB, Is America Disintegrating?

Counterpunch:
VIJAY PRASHAD, Qaddafi, From Beginning to End
PAUL IMISON, The Drug War in Mexico
GARETH PORTER, Was the Iranian Plot a Plan for Retaliation?
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS, America’s New African Empire
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, Imperial Massacres

Why Do Men and Women Talk Differently

The Endless Courtship Fantasy

Risky “Sexual Marketplace”: Beware Loathsome STDs

Catholic:
Good news for the Eastern province: Dominican Rite Instruction in Washington DC
Reform of the Reform beginning with the Ordinariates?...
Oxford Oratory Ordination
John Zmirak, Heresy Gets Things Done
Halo Shapes: Round or Triangular?
Healey Willan Society Established by Canons Regular of St. John Cantius
Baldichin by Baldichin

More Alternate Views on Commemorating 9/11

Lewis McCrary, Why We Should Forget 9/11

Tom Engelhardt, Let’s Cancel 9/11 (via TAC) - TomDispatch

Patrick Buchanan, What 9/11 Wrought: The Bush Legacy

Items of Interest, 1 July 2011

The cloud with no name: Meteorologists campaign to classify unique 'Asperatus' clouds seen across the world By Luke Salkeld

Another $500 knife from TAD (already out of stock?)

Energy: Making sense of peak oil and energy uncertainty (EB)
Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute
(the report)

Wales: a Co-operative nation? Molly Scott Cato, Gaian Economics

The New Balance Minimus: The Best Minimalist Training Shoe on the Market

Counterpunch:
Darwin Bond-Graham, Nuclear Fiddling, While Los Alamos Burns
Carol Miller, Burning the Truth at Los Alamos: Nukes, Fire and Secrecy
Neil L. Whitehead, Divine Hunger: the Cannibal War Machine
Saul Landau, Targeting Libya, Hitting the Constitution
Franklin Lamb, Dispatch from Tripoli: Countdown to Invasion
Tom Engelhardt, Obama's Military Mantra
Linda Greene, Obama's War on Whistleblowers
Thomas H. Naylor, What are You Going to Do About the Empire?
Martha Rosenberg, Lost in Psychiatryland

Tom Engelhardt, Defining an American State of War (Counterpunch)

Items of Interest, 9 June 2011

Shades of Grey: The Record of Archbishop Stepinac by Srdja Trifkovic

The Ever-Expanding National Security Complex By TOM ENGELHARDT

Sailing craft for a post-collapse world by Dmitry Orlov

Theodore Dalrymple, Murder Most Academic: A British Ph.D. candidate puts “homicide studies” into practice.

A comment at Life after RC: Executive Summit on Ethics for the Business World

Items of Interest, 4 May 2011

Herman Daly, Not production, not consumption but transformation

Israel Shamir, US Knew Where Osama Was Since 2005
Mike Whitney, American Savagery
Robert Fisk, Why are We Still in Afghanistan?

There's a lot more on Osama Bin Laden at Counterpunch...

Blackwater’s New Ethics Chief: John Ashcroft

Japan should look to satoyama and satoumi for inspiration
Anantha Kumar Duraiappah, Kazuhiko Takeuchi and Carmen Scherkenbach, Our World 2.0

The practices of satoyama and satoumi refer to traditional Japanese land-management methods in inland (satoyama) and coastal (satoumi) areas. The concepts, which comprise not just agricultural techniques but entire socio-ecological systems, have provided in the past for sustainable, high-biodiversity areas that produce a range of “ecosystem services” — from timber, rice and fish to energy (biomass and hydropower for instance) and tourism. Although not quantifiable in purely economic terms, the concepts have provided residents and visitors with significant cultural and social benefits.

A wallet full of scrambled eggs
Gene Logsdon, The Contrary Farmer

For some reason, no doubt because I am a child of the money economy, my biggest distress was over my billfold. It was covered in yellow slime. I hurried over to the machine shed where I knew some rags were hanging, and commenced to clean up my proud symbol of capitalism. Then I tried to wipe the yokes and white stuff out of the pocket although by now much of it was all sliding lasciviously down my leg.

China as Number One? Don’t bet your bottom dollar
by Tom Engelhardt

American military air power

It doesn't take much to strafe and drop bombs on people who can't effectively fight back. When they're innocent civilians, shouldn't we be expecting some sort of blowback?

Tom Engelhardt, What US Air Power Actually Does

An update on the Raymond Davis affair:
Raymond Davis Walks
By DAVE LINDORFF

Some Recent Posts from American Empire Project

Cow Most Sacred
Why Military Spending Remains Untouchable
By Andrew J. Bacevich

Cutting $100 Billion?... Easy
If Only Washington Had a Brain
By Tom Engelhardt

All-American Decline in a New World
Wars, Vampires, Burned Children, and Indelicate Imbalances
By Tom Engelhardt


The Collapse of the Old Oil Order
How the Petroleum Age Will End
By Michael T. Klare

Dean Baker on the housing bubble

How Many Economists Does It Take to See an $8 Trillion Housing Bubble?
By DEAN BAKER.
Sticking the Taxpayer (Not the Banks) With the Tab

And: The Urge to Surge
By TOM ENGLEHARDT
War is a Drug

Tom Engelhardt on the wikileaking

Tom Engelhardt, Blood on Whose Hands?

As for the men who oversaw the endless wars that produced that video (and, without doubt, many similar ones similarly cloaked in the secrecy of “national security”), their fates are no less sure. When Admiral Mullen relinquishes his post and retires, he will undoubtedly have the choice of lucrative corporate boards to sit on, and, if he cares to, lucrative consulting to do for the Pentagon or eager defense contractors, as well as an impressive pension to take home with him. Secretary of Defense Gates will undoubtedly leave his post with a wide range of job offers to consider, and if he wishes, he will probably get a million-dollar contract to write his memoirs. Both will be praised, no matter what happens in or to their wars. Neither will be considered in any way responsible for those tens of thousands of dead civilians in distant lands.

Moral culpability? It doesn’t apply. Not to Americans — not unless they leak military secrets. None of the men responsible will ever look at their hands and experience an “out, damned spot!” moment. That’s a guarantee. However, a young man who, it seems, saw the blood and didn’t want it on his hands, who found himself “actively involved in something that I was completely against,” who had an urge to try to end two terrible wars, hoping his act would cause “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms,” will pay the price for them. He will be another body not to count in the collateral damage their wars have caused. He will also be collateral damage to the Afghan antiwar movement that wasn’t.

The men who led us down this path, the presidents who presided over our wars, the military figures and secretaries of defense, the intelligence chiefs and ambassadors who helped make them happen, will have libraries to inaugurate, books to write, awards to accept, speeches to give, honors to receive. They will be treated with great respect, while Americans — once we have finally left the lands we insistently fought over — will undoubtedly feel little culpability either. And if blowback comes to the United States, and the first suicide drones arrive, everyone will be deeply puzzled and angered, but one thing is certain, we will not consider any damage done to our society “collateral” damage.

Items of Interest, 28 June 2010

A review of the LWRCI M6A2 in Guns & Ammo.

The Prisoner of Gen. Petraeus by Patrick J. Buchanan

Zenit:
Pope's Homily at Vespers for Sts. Peter and Paul
"The Church Is an Immense Force of Renewal in the World"

Papal Address to Orthodox Delegation
"Your Presence ... Brings Great Gladness to the Hearts of Us All"

Asia Times:
Macau chief Chui talks the talk
In his first six months in office, Macau chief executive Fernando Chui Sai-on has said all the right things - from promising new public housing units to protecting local workers from imported labor. But many in Macau wonder when his actions will begin to match his good intentions. - Muhammad Cohen

Truly detached from war (original)
The newest American form of war, drones, captures perfectly a larger detachment from the wars the United States fights. This is not just the separation by thousands of kilometers of pilots from the battlefields on which they shoot their missiles, but the very detachment of the American public from the conflicts they send their army (and a vast corps of for-profit private contractors) out to fight. - Tom Engelhardt

Energy Bulletin:
Wine, local food, and local resilience, Part 4 (original)

Don Plummer, The Trillium Patch

In this series’ previous post, we discussed making wine at home as a possible solution to wine availability in an age of declining cheap energy. In this the final post of this series, we will discuss in some detail the advantages of home grape growing and wine making. Along the way, we’ll mention organic viticulture methods and briefly discuss the advantages and disadvantages of specific grape varieties that might be considered for a home vineyard.