Fire and Knowledge

‘Marriage Is for White People’

The marriage rate for African Americans has been dropping since the 1960s, and today, we have the lowest marriage rate of any racial group in the United States….

I was stunned to learn that a black child was more likely to grow up living with both parents during slavery days than he or she is today, according to sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin.

Cellphones in Flight? This Means War!

Ben Stein writes about a new decision to be made about the future of cell phones in planes. If this happens–and no doubt, if the Airlines can make money off it, it will–flying will be even less enticing.

[T]here is a decision pending within the bowels of the federal government that may be the single most incomprehensibly wrongheaded decision of the century. It’s small when compared with Iraq, but it’s still maddening. It involves allowing passengers to talk on their cellphones while they are in flight.

Now, as everyone who has the misfortune to fly commercially knows, air travel today is mind-bogglingly uncomfortable. The seats are small. The flights are nearly always full to overflowing. The food is unspeakable. The air is fetid and filled with germs. Many a time I board an airliner hale and hearty, only to emerge with a raging pneumonia.

But there is one saving grace. Unless you are seated behind or next to really rude people — which happens surprisingly rarely — air travel is fairly quiet. Yes, the flight attendants stand around and talk. Yes, before the plane takes off people scream into their cellphones, but along about three hours into the flight from, say, Kennedy to LAX, it’s pretty peaceful.

That’s solely because passengers can’t use cellphones aloft. That prohibition was one of the great decisions ever. Now, in a fit of idiocy, some airlines are suggesting that they be allowed to sell the use of cellphones in the air at nominal prices. This will mean yelling and screaming and boasting and complaining for almost all the time you’re sealed in that sardine can. The government is apparently planning to allow this anarchy.

(via Question Technology)

Earn a little and spend a little less.

–Robert Louis Stevenson (Christmas Sermon)

We must see that it is foolish, sinful, and suicidal to destroy the health of nature for the sake of an economy that is really not an economy at all but merely a financial system, one that is unnatural, undemocratic, sacrilegious, and ephemeral. We must see the error of our effort to live by fire, by burning the world in order to live in it.

—Wendell Berry, “Conservation and Local Economy,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 201

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), pp. 67-68

The victory of industrialism over Luddism was thus overwhelming and unconditional; it was undoubtedly the most complete, significant, and lasting victory of modern times. And so one must wonder at the intensity with which any suggestion of Luddism still is feared and hated. To this day, if you say you would be willing to forbid, restrict, or reduce the use of technological devices in order to protect the community—or to protect the good health of nature on which the community depends—you will be called a Luddite, and it will not be a compliment. To say that the community is more important than machines is certainly Christian and certainly democratic, but it is also Luddism and therefore not to be tolerated….

—Wendell Berry, “Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), pp. 168-169

The Ultimate Savings Guide

There are some good tips in these articles. Obviously, the easiest way to save money is to spend less. Unfortunately, many of us have a tough time doing that. It’s also important to buy quality products and reusable products. They also give tips on how to “survive” on only one income. Yes, it is possible!

(via HNBP)

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by…. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading—that is a good life.

—Annie Dillard, The Writing Life (1989), p. 33