Charles Eisenstein on Localization

At the deepest level, localization is about connection.

Hear about this perspective in @ceisenstein World Localization Day message - https://t.co/zCZ6cIMzm7 pic.twitter.com/wgYBK87SCF

— Local Futures / Economics of Happiness (@localfutures_) August 5, 2021

Charles Eisenstein's Version of the Great Rest

We've just published a new blog post!

Follow the link in our bio to read 'Source Temple and the Great Reset' by @ceisenstein - https://t.co/U2nol5Ipnv

— Local Futures / Economics of Happiness (@localfutures_) July 13, 2021

Charles Eisenstein on Localization

Charles Eisenstein for @localfutures_ on how living unsustainably doesn’t even make us happy - and why localisation could help remedy that:https://t.co/R6F9jRrYLR

— slheatons (@slheatons) July 8, 2021

Gretchen Legler on Bhutan and People-Centered Economics

Post by The Economics of Happiness.

People-Centered Economics?

Charles Eisenstein on Gift Economies

Charles Eisenstein: 'In a gift economy the more you give, the richer you are' - video

Items of Interest, 2 March 2012

Andrew Bacevich, Uncle Sam, Global Gangster

The End in Afghanistan
Two more US soldiers killed by Afghan gunmen

Daniel Larison, Attacking Iran All But Guarantees Nuclear Weapons Proliferation

Daniel McCarthy, The Totalitarian Constitution

Virtue, Wisdom, Experience, Not Abstract Rights, Form the Basis of the American Republic by Gregory S. Ahern

James Q. Wilson, RIP

Thomas Fleming, US Senators in Hell's Kitchen

Killing babies no different from abortion, experts say

ResPublica: Our House: Reflections on Representation and Reform in the House of Lords

Rod Dreher, Theodicy on the Highway

Thank goodness daddy can’t really protect her from bad guys!
Forget Canada.

Economics and Environment:
The Conservative Case Against Free Trade

There is an alternative by Charles Eisenstein (EB)

Vermont Commons: Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein - A Short Film

Vimeo
Film Premiere Q&A (mp3)

Oceans acidifying faster today than in past 300 million years
How many assumptions are at work here?

Are We Doomed? - YERT


PCI Profile for James Howard Kunstler

Relocalization:
On The Prince’s Speech: The Future of Food by Antonio Roman-Alcalá (EB)

The Happy Hoarder: Feed bag edition

Spanish Village, in Debt, Relies on Volunteers

Obstacles to Going Back to the Land

Zenit:
The "Papal Coronation Oath"
And More on Alternate Venues for Attending Mass

Growing in Our Call to Holiness
Lenten resource helps Catholics learn about their faith through examples of the saints

Finding Jesus in Israel (Part 2)
Vicar of Hebrew-Speaking Catholics Tells His Story

Finding Jesus in Israel (Part 1)
Vicar of Hebrew-Speaking Catholics Tells His Story

A Family Lesson From the Ratzingers
Micael Hesemann Speaks of Compiling Georg's Testimony in "My Brother, The Pope"

Catholic:
What they have wrought: a "culture" built on the "license of base fornicating women" - something from Casti connubii. And the feminists are willing dupes.

Sandro Magister, Legionaries. The Young Vicar and the Restless Virgins

Insight Scoop: If you haven't been to the CWR blog lately, you have likely missed...

Daniel Larison, Why Was Nestorius Wrong?

Conversion, Sex, and Segregation: Jews and Christians in Medieval Spain

Education:
Circe Institute: Interview with Dr. James Taylor (mp3)

The Invitation to the Great Conversation by Robert M. Woods

Diet and Health:
The 2nd MovNat Principle: Instinctual

Music:
Punch Brothers: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3


Josh Groban and Tony Bennett

Misc:
Field and Stream: Best New Knives of 2012
Gear Scout: Triple Aught Design (TAD) Ranger Hoodie Long Term Review

Items of Interest, 17 February 2012

Finished this response; will try to finish a couple of more on community and contemporary communitarianism before I take a break.

Thomas Fleming, American Idols and A Christian Defense of the Unspeakable Dawkins

Lessons in Empire

Marriage of Rights and Duties

Daniel Larison informs us that Andrew Bacevich is the editing a new book - The Short American Century: A Post-Mortem and American Exceptionalism

Oakeshott and Conservatism

Patrick Buchanan, Blacklisted But Not Beaten

I know there are some who are enthusiastic about Elizabeth Warren as a candidate in MA, but this (and her purported support for the feminist legal system) should give them some pause: Elizabeth Warren’s Rhetorical Extremism.

Mary Jo Anderson, Journalist for EWTN – and Professor Kevin Gutzman, Author of James Madison and the Making America – Join for Throwdown Thursday

Woods on Schiff with Rockwell and Gutzman

Faith and Marriage Under Attack

Patrick Deneen, Our Libertarian Future and Religious Liberty?

Obamacare:
Religious Freedom and the Triumph of the Therapeutic by Thaddeus Kozinski
Paul Gottfried, Immaculate Secularism
Rod Dreher, Liberalism's Assault on Catholicism and Has the Catholics Moment Passed?

Fast and Furious:
James Antle, Mission Implausible

Obama:
'Obama Girl' Turns on President, Slams Him in New Video

Economics:
The Fight of the Century by Richard Heinberg (EB)
Free online showing of The Economics of Happiness, followed by a live Q&A with Helena Norberg-Hodge (co-director and producer of The Economics of Happiness), Steven Gorelick (co-director of The Economics of Happiness), Manish Jain (founder of The People's Institute for Rethinking Education and Development) and Charles Eisenstein (author of Sacred Economics).
URL to be announced.

Relocalization:
The challenge of re-localisation by Graham Barnes (EB)
Book Review: Urban Homesteading by Oliver Lazenby (EB)
Big government and big corporations befriend the local food movement by Olga Bonfiglio
MDA: The Art of Crafting with Your Hands
Taproot Magazine

Farming:
Why Farms Want Cold Winters

Energy and Peak Oil:
World oil supply debate between ex-Shell chief and ASPO-USA professor
by Karen Rybold-Chin (EB)

Will Occupy Wall Street start drilling for peak oil?

How reliable are U.S. Department of Energy oil production forecasts? by Roger Blanchard (EB)
World energy consumption - beyond 500 exajoules by Rembrandt Koppelaar (EB)
Peak Oil and the Importance of EROI (review of Fleeing Vesuvius, Part 2)
The Grey, a peak oil flick quick take

Monsanto:
Open Seeds: Biopiracy and the Patenting of Life by grtv

Catholic:
Robert J. Araujo, SJ: What is freedom?
Introducing Chant into the Domestic Church
Culture, Liturgy, Beauty and Anthropology by David Clayton

Diet and Health:
Ask the Low-Carb Experts 6: ‘All Things Lipids (Cholesterol 101)’ | Chris Masterjohn (mp3)

Karen De Coster, Functional Medicine vs the Conventional Approach
How 1-minute intervals can improve our health

Feminism:
James Taranto Takes on Hypergamy

History:
Let It Not Happen Again by Clarence Moriwaki
Reflections on the 70th anniversary of Japanese American incarcerations.
If only immigration had been restricted... would there have been a  question of loyalty about a subset of the population? Why do we let Muslims immigrate to this country?

Which reminds me, I dreamt about SO a couple of days ago. I think she lives in Hawaii now. I saw some recent pics on her brother's FB. She has two or three kids, I can't remember. When I saw those photos I recalled how she defended "the right to an abortion" in high school. The details of the dream are lost to me now - I think it was related to HS drama/relationship problems.

Was Beowulf an Empty Nester?
Interview with Author Nancy Bilyeau (via Supremacy and Survival)

Music:
Alison Krauss & Union Station Commemorate The Simpsons 500th Episode with a Song
Brumel’s Missa “Et ecce terrae motus” (mp3)
Stile Antico on BBC3 (4 days left to listen)
Natalie MacMaster has a new album, Cape Breton Girl.

Misc:
Tim Kennedy - in a Gerber video for a giveaway contest

Mutually Dependent

I think Alasdair MacIntyre would be pleased:To Build Community, an Economy of Gifts by Charles Eisenstein- For a multitude of reasons, we need to need each other. (EB)

I think this is off:

More directly posed: community is nearly impossible in a highly monetized society like our own. That is because community is woven from gifts, which is ultimately why poor people often have stronger communities than rich people. If you are financially independent, then you really don't depend on your neighbors—or indeed on any specific person—for anything. You can just pay someone to do it, or pay someone else to do it.

Community was lost as a result of cultural priorities manifested in individual choices and economic and political pressures. The use of money may foster a psychological blindness to our need for others, that is true, as well as a false sense of self-sufficiency. Getting rid of money in our economic exchanges may force us to evaluate how we can be useful to one another, that is true. As a community-building exercise, its usefulness is rather limited. Of course, progressive liberals presume that everyone else is the right-thinking sort, and that there are no big obstacles to community. We just need to be forced to interact with one another, and everything will turn out fine.

Community is woven from gifts. Unlike today's market system, whose built-in scarcity compels competition in which more for me is less for you, in a gift economy the opposite holds. Because people in gift culture pass on their surplus rather than accumulating it, your good fortune is my good fortune: more for you is more for me. Wealth circulates, gravitating toward the greatest need. In a gift community, people know that their gifts will eventually come back to them, albeit often in a new form. Such a community might be called a "circle of the gift."

Fortunately, the monetization of life has reached its peak in our time, and is beginning a long and permanent receding (of which economic "recession" is an aspect). Both out of desire and necessity, we are poised at a critical moment of opportunity to reclaim gift culture, and therefore to build true community. The reclamation is part of a larger shift of human consciousness, a larger reunion with nature, earth, each other, and lost parts of ourselves. Our alienation from gift culture is an aberration and our independence an illusion. We are not actually independent or "financially secure" – we are just as dependent as before, only on strangers and impersonal institutions, and, as we are likely to soon discover, these institutions are quite fragile.

The diffusion of the good -- first of all in our desires and choices and through them, the passing on of our actions and material things. This is a more holistic vision of communal life with which the wise and Catholics can agree and have built upon in their teachings. After all, the diffusion of the good is proper to love.

Recognizing our dependence and reliance upon on another for satisfying certain material needs is important, but it is not as important having a common vision of [communal] life which is necessary for solidarity (along with identity, a common culture, and so on). A community is a group of people who want to live with one another, not just because they depend on each other but also because they desire to live with them. Commercial relationships or friendships are important, but they are not the same as civic friendship (the mistaken opinion of liberals reading Aristotle).

Finally, the circle can do a third round in which people express gratitude for the things they received since the last meeting. This round is extremely important because in community, the witnessing of others' generosity inspires generosity in those who witness it. It confirms that this group is giving to each other, that gifts are recognized, and that my own gifts will be recognized, appreciated, and reciprocated as well.

The community-building exercises do sound hokey and rather forced. Should we not be expressing gratitude to one another in our exchanges? Moreover, there is a danger inherent to turning generosity and gratitude into a spectacle - it can become an occasion for competition and vice. Finally, we need to realize that each person is a gift to the community (as well as the role he exercises), with the ultimate source of good being God. Another sentimental version of secular humanism (or some alternate spirituality) will be inadequate to deal with the reality of sin and human imperfection (especially with the devil and his ilk seeking to trip people up).

Related:
Alasdair MacIntyre's Political Liberalism
Thaddeus J. Kozinski

Items of Interest, 31 October 2011

Tom Piatak's review of Pat Buchanan's The Suicide of a Superpower: The Mob vs. the Statesman
Thomas Fleming, And the scary part is, one of these candidates will become President...
Peter Hitchens, Judas, the First Socialist, and other issues
VoxDay, A boomer confesses

Can states nullify Obamacare?

Preparing...
Escape routes: Fleeing Vesuvius – which way should we go? (EB)
The Lifeboat Hour (10/30/11) - mp3
Mike welcomes Charles Eisenstein back to the Lifeboat Hour for another great interview. They discuss the Occupy Movement, Transition Economics, and the accelerating Collapse of the Infinite Growth paradigm. Mike also shares insights from his overnight at Occupy Santa Rosa on Saturday 10/29. Santa Rosa PD had planned to raid the encampment that evening, so Mike joined the ranks to help deter them. Fortunately, such a strong show of support turned out that the raid was called off Saturday afternoon.


OWS:
Occupy Wall Street: No demand is big enough by Charles Eisenstein (EB)
Occupy Demands: Let’s radicalize our analysis of empire, economics, ecology by Robert Jensen

Oil:
Top 5 Ways to Occupy Big Oil
Commentary: Americans deserve the truth about potential oil crisis
Jim Baldauf and Jan Lars Mueller, ASPO-USA

Sustainability:
How to feed 7 billion of us without ruining the planet
Urban planning and food by Michael Lardelli
The tyranny of comfort by Rob Dietz (EB)

Higher Education:
Bill Bonner, Misguided by Higher Education
A lefty: Casino Capitalism and Higher Education
Of course, it's only critical thinking if it rejects what we think should be rejected.

Kate Bolick:
Oz Conservative: Feminists for polygamy
Jeffrey Polet, Being in ones 20′s and single. Make that 30′s. Make that 40′s.
I think Dalrock and other similar bloggers generally have a better understanding of Kate Bolick...

This Slate writer is correct to warn writers against over-generalizing, but may be wrong to deny that a trend exists in a particular class of American women.

Emperor of What? by KMO (EB)

"KMO welcomes Charles Eisenstein back to the C-Realm Podcast to discuss his new book, Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition. Charles talks about interest and the economic imperatives that it fosters. If the value of money decreased over time rather than growing via interest, then it would be clear to everyone that the best thing one can do with one's money is to spend it quickly and close to home. In times of chaos and potential collapse, the best way to preserve wealth is to give your money away to those in need. Music by Inspired Flight."