Kay Hymowitz responds to critics

But is it enough? The Decline of Men is a Women’s Issue

She doesn't address hypergamy, only suggesting perhaps that something need to be done to keep men in college so that they can earn college degrees.

Yo-Yo Ma - The Goat Rodeo Sessions - Teaser One

Thank the Muslims for being Muslims?

Greg Sisk, Religion, Community, and Optimism for the Future: The Example of Muslims

Mr. Sisk links to this piece by Rod Dreher: Could This Be Islam's Moment in the UK? Mr. Dreher writes:

It is hard to know to what extent this is a matter of ethnic solidarity, religious solidarity, or (most likely) a combination of both. But it is impressive, and praiseworthy. And it is not surprising, either, given the far higher levels of community cohesion and socially beneficial values held by the UK's Muslim community.

Any evidence of assimilation? Did they help out their non-Muslim, white neighbors? How many Anglos live in Hodge Hill? What, exactly, is one supposed to infer from the fact that they seem to be doing fine in their enclaves? That there is very little chance that they will be radicalized and become the next suicide bombers in the UK? Mr. Dreher questions whether Islam is the future of the UK, and yet Mr. Sisk praises them for their tribalism. The proposition nation is intellectually shallow, and the nation-state promotes the destruction of local community and ties while the bureaucratic welfare state only makes things worse. Do Christians need to live as communitarians? Sure. But that does not mean that multiculturalism is a good thing or should be maintained.

Items of Interest, 17 August 2011

Daniel Lerch interview on peak oil

An economy turned upside down by Mira Luna (EB)

Christopher Ferrara, The Austrian Version of the English Enclosures Part II

Theodore Dalrymple, Sloppy Riot Thinking
Are pre-2008 bankers the moral equivalents of British looters?


Whose values?

August Glut by (EB) Gene Logsdon

Despite flood, hail, drought, high winds, plant diseases, weeds, bugs, deteriorating muscles, coons, deer, squirrels, moles, stock market crashes, grain market inflation, skyrocketing land prices, root rot, robins, rabbits, and radio talk shows, once more the annual great miracle has occurred. We are (literally after the last downpour) swimming in homegrown food. The August Glut is upon us, and we dance among the corn stalks in sheer delight.

The most dangerous machine ever built by Erik Curren (EB)

Gareth Porter, Veto Over the Drones

How safe is the US?

Tot up the United States national security bill and you quickly reach US$8 trillion over the past decade and perhaps even a few trillion more. What did it all go on? No one can be very sure. And did it buy "security" - or make the country less safe? - Chris Hellman

The Thinking Housewife, Why the Love Ideal of Marriage Doesn’t Work

E. F. Schumacher

The Vision of E.F. Schumacher
Church social doctrine played a major role in the development of Small Is Beautiful. The Register takes a look at the work and the author 100 years after his birth.
Share
by JOSEPH PEARCE

Small Is Beautiful: Impressions of Fritz Schumacher

Items of Interest, 16 August 2011

Transition Voice: No shirt, no shoes, no problem. Interview: Dmitry Orlov

Brendan O'Neill, Starkey racism row: It is the political elite's ceaseless denigration of white working-class culture that has 'turned kids black'

Jean Bricmont / Diana Johnstone, Who Will Save Libya From Its Western Saviours?

Christopher Hellman, The Pentagon's Wild Spending Spree

"How to win an argument with a vegetarian," by Denise Minger

What on earth is all this Paleo/Primal talk anyway?

Nora Jane Struthers

Do-it-yourself battlefield medicine saves lives By LINDSEY TANNER

Katherine Jenkins - La vie en rose 2010

On Truth and Trade: Economics and the Catholic Vision of the Good Life
Bernardo Aparicio García, Robert T. Miller, John C. Médaille


The Cosmopolitan Conservative by R.R. Reno

A fanciful view of liberalism -- what classical ideal are we talking about?

Ideally, the liberal seeks a cosmopolitanism of impartiality, one that calls for “public reasons” that everyone can agree on. It’s a classical ideal of cosmopolitanism based on a vision of universal reason safely above the particular religious and moral beliefs that often serve as the source of discord and division. A laudable goal, perhaps, but in point of fact this ideal tends to undermine rather than promote solidarity. Those who imagine themselves to have attained the universality of reason preside at a distance, casting themselves in the roles of referee and judge responsible for determining whose reasons are “public” or indeed “reasonable.”

Or worse, they become cultural therapists, anointed experts in the supposed pathologies of conviction and cultural conflict. The therapeutic ethos receives support in present-day liberalism from a widespread skepticism that seems the opposite of older beliefs in universal reason but turns out to lead to the same governing mentality. We can’t know moral or religious truths, we are told, and to know that we can’t know creates the paradoxical imperative to denounce moral imperatives so that we can manage our differences in an “inclusive” and “nonjudgmental” fashion.

Judge or referee, therapist or manager, the liberal governs from above. This distance—the conviction that liberalism has somehow transcended the nitty-gritty of substantive debate and attained a higher outlook—is what allows the old-fashioned rationalists like Steven Pinker to ally themselves with postmodern skeptics in the liberal establishment. The liberal maintains his distance, exempting himself (or imagining himself exempted) from the agonies of the always morally, metaphysically, and religiously fraught content of important human interactions. It’s this insulating distance, along with a therapeutic understanding of those below them, that encourages unwarranted feelings of superiority. The liberal does not see the conservative as a man or woman with ideas and convictions to be engaged but as a person with prejudices and interests to be diagnosed and treated.

Earlier, though, Mr. Reno wants to safeguard his credentials as one of the enlightened:

Although liberals like to think that those who remain conservative have somehow evaded or insulated themselves from these challenges, the reality is that conservatives have participated in modernity just as fully. Traditional social and religious views have often (though not always) been criticized for good reasons. We don’t want our daughters’ futures to be limited in the way roles for women were at the beginning of the modern era, nor do we mourn the passing of racial segregation and the indignities of Jim Crow.

What does First Things have to offer for the traditional conservative or traditionalist?

Items of Interest, 15 August 2011

Thomas Storck, Three Strategies for Evasion

Interview with Stephen Clay McGehee of Southern Agrarian

LONDON/ Blond: There are two enemies that are destroying Britain

I think he is tiptoeing around the multiculturalism problem, limiting it only to the appearance of  "thieves, robbers and violent muggers developing separately from us."

Theodore Dalrymple, The Barbarians Inside Britain's Gates

Michael Pollan's Secrets of the Supermarket (VIDEO)


Kevin Carson, Corporations Are People? So Was Hitler

World Food Faileo

End Back Pain: Stretchsitting

Counterpunch: The New Face of War by John Grant
Special Ops and the Spectre of Terrorism

DoD names troops killed in Chinook shootdown
Portraits of Navy SEALs killed in helicopter crash

Edit.
Fabius Maximus, What will our Mercs do when our wars wind down? Who will hire them?

John Médaille, We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us

FPR

It includes a critique of Robert Miller's Waiting for St. Vladimir.

Karen De Coster on the 2011 Ancestral Health Symposium

A Libertarian’s Take on the First Ever Ancestral Health Symposium

Edit. Free the Animal: Ancestral Health Symposium Controversies Podcast: From High Heels to Gary vs. Stephan #AHS11 - Latest in Paleo, Episode 28: AHS Animal Style

Feast of the Assumption

Not a holy day of obligation in the United States, its celebration was transferred to yesterday.


Organ accompaniment?


In Spanish?

Psallentes:

Foundations of Libertarian Ethics, with Roderick T. Long

Youtube (10 parts)

NSSF Shooting Sportscast

Understanding Minute of Angle (MOA) - Rifle Shooting Technique - NSSF Shooting Sportscast

Video: Understanding Mils (Milliradians)

NYT: Anthony Bourdain By KATE MURPHY

"WATCHING I tend to binge on directors. Just came off a long Wong Kar-wai jag. His films have incredibly beautiful people, gorgeous lighting, a romantic feel, and I like his sense of humor."

A WKW fan.

"CONSUMING I’m looking forward to my next meal at Takashi on Hudson Street. It’s a Japanese/Korean barbecue place that’s heavy on the raw meat and offal. To have a place in New York that serves so much guts is encouraging and, in this case, delicious."

Takashi.

A different perspective on the UK riots

UK riots' resource and cultural roots: an in-the-trenches report
by Jan Lundberg and Chris Dilworth (EB)

There has been good stuff written from all perspectives, and while those who put the blame on the rioters and on the government for failing society are correct, there may be something to the anger and frustration many may feel in the UK. Instead of looting and burning down stores, why didn't they go up against the state? Or are we just blaming them for being stupid? It would have taken courage and a spirit of sacrifice to attack the buildings of government and corporations.

Another leftist piece: A time of riot: England and the world
by Paul Rogers (EB)

We Can't Teach Students to Love Reading By Alan Jacobs

Reading Alan Jacobs on Reading by Trevor Logan

His book: The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

Alan Jacobs discusses 'The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction' from The New Atlantis on Vimeo.

Photos and video of the 2011 Napa Pontifical Mass

Online seminar: Transitioning a Community with Paul and Sarah Edwards

The seminar is August 17, 5:30 P.M. PST. info

More from Peter Hitchens on the riots

Police water cannon and plastic bullets? After 50 years of the most lavish welfare state on earth? What an abject failure

Take our Prime Minister, who is once again defrauding far too many people. He uses his expensive voice, his expensive clothes, his well-learned tone of public-school command, to give the impression of being an effective and decisive person. But it is all false. He has no real idea of what to do. He thinks the actual solutions to the problem are ‘fascist’. Deep down, he still wants to ‘understand’ the hoodies.

Say to him that naughty children should be smacked at home and caned in school, that the police (and responsible adults) should be free to wallop louts and vandals caught in the act, that the police should return to preventive foot patrols, that prisons should be austere places of hard work, plain food and discipline without TV sets or semi-licit drugs, and that wrongdoers should be sent to them when they first take to crime, not when they are already habitual crooks, and he will throw up his well-tailored arms in horror at your barbarity.

Say to him that divorce should be made very difficult and that the state should be energetically in favour of stable, married families with fathers (and cease forthwith to subsidise families without fathers) and he will smirk patronisingly and regard you as a pitiable lunatic.

Say to him that mass immigration should be stopped and reversed, and that those who refuse any of the huge number of jobs which are then available should be denied benefits of any kind, and he will gibber in shock.

Yet he is ready to authorise the use of water cannon and plastic bullets on our streets (quite useless, as it happens, against this sort of outbreak) as if we were a Third World despotism.

Water cannon and plastic bullets indeed. What an utter admission of failure, that after 50 years of the most lavish welfare state in the solar system, you cannot govern your country without soaking the citizenry in cold water and bombarding them with missiles from a safe distance. Except, of course, that it is because of the welfare system that this is so.

The Gypsies on Crossfit Radio

CrossFit Radio Episode 184 (mp3)

Mat Lalonde and Mark Sisson with Robb Wolf

The Paleo Solution, Episode 92 (mp3)

SJ Mercury: Full Circle Farm sets down urban roots in Sunnyvale

Soompi: Whale Reveals Cover of 'Time After Time'