Showing all posts tagged #localism:
Posted on January 26th, 2022
We live in a time when technologies and ideas (often the same thing) are adopted in response not to need but to advertising, salesmanship, and fashion. Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on "doing us good" according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication. These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dr...
Posted on January 10th, 2022
Going Home with Wendell BerryThe writer and farmer on local knowledge, embracing limits, and the exploitation of rural America.
By Amanda PetrusichJuly 14, 2019Wendell Berry is the author of more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, and essays.Photograph by Guy MendesTwo and a half years ago, feeling existentially adrift about the future of the planet, I sent a letter to Wendell Berry, hoping he might have answers. Berry has publish...
Posted on January 10th, 2022
One of the natural loves that humans possess is a love of place. Bubbling up from love for home and love for creation, the love of place shapes humans, conforming them to the topography of the landscapes they inhabit. As C. S. Lewis notes, to speak of a love of home is to conjure up images associated with a way of life at a particular place—all of the sights, sounds, smells, mannerisms, dialect, and other peculiarities associated wit...
Posted on November 1st, 2021
There’s a whale about to be dropped on the desert of Utah. Not a live animal, but a system, a mindset. Since Thomas Hobbes wrote his famous book in 1651, "leviathan"—the word means "whale" in Hebrew—has come to signify anything large, unwieldy, and dominant. The beast in question here combines government regulation, mass tourism, and modern disenchantment. It is a proposed national monument, bigger than the state of Delaware, and onc...
Posted on November 1st, 2021
Watching the many oblong games—football, basketball, soccer, hockey—might lead one to believe that our human purpose is to prevail in a territorial conquest. All these sports are essentially the same; as David Bentley Hart describes such games, they are contests "played out on a rectangle between two sides, each attempting to penetrate the other’s territory to deposit some small object in the other’s goal or end zone." Baseball, howe...
Posted on November 1st, 2021
College campuses are now filled with students wondering whether the years they are spending away from home and the debt they are incurring in the process will ever be worth it, especially now that an expensive degree is far from a guarantee of future employment. Even their professors are not immune to doubts about the value of higher education. Jack Baker and Jeffrey Bilbro of Spring Arbor University are writing primarily to their fe...
Posted on December 15th, 2019
It is commonplace for scholars and academicians to allude to the Greek quest for political solidarity (homonoia) and to the hostility to commerce by saying that the ancient economy was embedded in society. Those who speak of the economy being embedded in society take for granted the distinction between government or state and society; and this distinction, prepared if not explicitly introduced by John Locke, belongs to the world of t...
Posted on July 5th, 2019
First, The Basics.
Cascades are the standard readjustment for complex systems.
There is an *essential* distinction between the conditions that allow crises to emerge, and the particular events that trigger the cascade into crisis. — Joe Norman
Big whirls have little whirls that feed on their velocity, and little whirls have lesser whirls, and so on to viscosity. — Lewis Fry Richardson, (1922)
Interdependence.
Strong Interdepende...
Posted on April 22nd, 2017
Why our greatest military theorist only made colonel.
John Boyd during the Korean War Off and on for about 20 years, I had the honor of working with the greatest military theorist America ever produced, Col. John Boyd, USAF. As a junior officer, Boyd developed the energy-management tactics now used by every fighter pilot in the world. Later, he influenced the designs of the F-15 and F-16, savin...