Fire and Knowledge

Joel Salatin, a farmer in Virginia (one of the best in America, as far as I know), wrote an interesting diatribe about how everything he wants to do is illegal. He can’t slaughter his own animals, collaborate marketing with neighbors, charge for farm tours, or build the house he wanted without government interference. If you don’t know much about how government makes life hard for small, environmentally-conscious farmers, you should definitely read this.

I learned about Joel in The Omnivore’s Dilemma and was really taken with his permacultural methods of farming. Someday my wife and I hope to visit his farm and attend one of his seminars.

This article made it on the homepage of del.icio.us, which is very encouraging. In fact, I have been very encouraged over the past year about how environmentally / agriculturally-aware our culture is becoming. It is still a very small segment to be sure, but it is starting to catch on. Thank God.

My hope is that someday feedlots, industrial agriculture, pollution, and destructive mining and foresting practices will be as reprehensible to us as racism.

Instead of imposing pro-choice and pro-life political litmus tests, why not work together on teen pregnancy, adoption reform, and real alternatives for women backed into dangerous and lonely corners? Do we really want to dramatically reduce abortion and make it “rare,” as Bill Clinton once suggested, or have both sides just continue to treat this issue as a political football?

–Jim Wallis, God’s Politics (2005), p. 79

Buy.com’s shopping cart is one of the worst I’ve seen. It is cluttered with ads, making it difficult to find the products in the cart or how to proceed. The main content the user wants is on the right sidebar — a place usually reserved for non-essential information:

Compare this with Desiring God’s shopping cart:

When we redesigned the Desiring God website last year, we took the opposite approach. We tried to make it as easy as possible for the user to see what they are ordering and how to proceed to the next step. (Genius, huh?)

I know which one I’d rather use when purchasing something online.

In our time a beard is the one thing a woman cannot do better than a man, or if she can her success is assured only in a circus.

–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (1962), p. 32

The site now has a tweaked design and a Wordpress upgrade (which fixed the comments issue). Even though the design only looks tweaked, it was actually re-written on the new Blueprint CSS framework.

Be sure to let me know if anything looks strange or whether you love it or hate it.

There are other countries, such as Italy and France, that decide their dinner questions on the basis of such quaint and unscientific criteria as pleasure and tradition, eat all manner of “unhealthy” foods, and lo and behold, wind up actually healthier and happier in their eating than we are. We show our surprise at this by speaking of something called the “French paradox,” for how could a people who eat such demonstrably toxic substances as foie gras and triple crème cheese actually be slimmer and healthier than we are? Yet I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to speak in terms of an American paradox—that is, a notably unhealthy people obsessed by the idea of eating healthily.

–Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), p. 3

Do you want to die at home with your people “in blessed peace around you,” which is the death Tiresias foresaw for Odysseus and the one Homer seems to recommend?

Or do you want to die in the hands of the best medical professionals wherever they are?

Such questions seem irrelevant until you realize that they define two very different lives.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), p. 146

When [black college] students were asked to identify their race on a [Graduate Record Examination] pretest questionnaire, that simple act was sufficient to prime them with all the negative stereotypes associated with African Americans and academic achievement — and the number of items they got right was cut in half.

–Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (2005), p. 56