Outside The Envelope

• What Farming Needs Today
  Farmers don’t take the initiative to learn on their own, so they are always over-capitalized.  They suffer from “heavy metal poisoning,” that is, they constantly have to pay for mountains of equipment they use only infrequently.  Their ownership of land also overcapitalizes them.
   
• The Leaven Community & The Agrarian Ideal: Debunking Agrarianism
  Community is essential to agrarianism.  To take up an agrarian life style, we must build communities, and these communities must leaven the rest of our society, because the modern world has gone so far wrong that it cannot be corrected; it must be rebuilt.
   
• SAVE US FROM AMERICANITY!
  Throughout the history of Christianity the Church has normally acted as the protector of the oppressed and the mother of liberty.  And whenever the Church abandons that role over against civil government, whenever she shifts her unconditional loyalty from King Jesus to the state, catastrophe ensues.
   
• COMRADE STALIN DOESN’T KNOW
  In The Gulag Archipelago Alexandr Solzhenitsyn recounts the first time he was arrested for political crimes.  While serving in the Soviet Army and fighting the Germans some casual comment got him arrested.  A convinced communist then, he spent his entire sentence in a labour camp consoling himself with one thought:  “Comrade Stalin doesn’t know.”
   
• THE WAR ON CHARACTER
  To the amalgamation of business and government that rules us I have referred by various names:  The Symbiosis, the Siamese twins, the oligarchy, the Establishment, or fascism.  All these names and metaphors are struggling to explain and identify the organism that rules us.  Its primary characteristic is the complete identification – simultaneity -- of business with government.
   
• BITTERSWEET OXYMORON: SAY GOOD-BYE TO THE PLEDGE
  First of all, the pledge is a standing offense.  At best it is a propaganda mechanism to indoctrinate children into unquestioning “loyalty”; at worst it is a continually-required loyalty oath, an insult to any person who conscientiously regards his given word as sufficient.
   
• THE LAST NEWSWEEK:
  I FINALLY GIVE UP ON CULCHER AND THE NEWS
  Fifteen years ago I used to read the newspaper (the Memphis Commercial Appeal] religiously every morning.  Then I noticed that every morning I became furiously angry, usually about the time I finished reading the newspaper.  Finally connecting effect with cause, I realised that the stupidity, lies, obscenities, and generally moronic events and acts recounted in the newspaper were making me mad.  Every morning I was overdosing on stupidity.
   
• THE MONEYCHANGER INTERVIEWS – THE MONEYCHANGER
  SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, HOW DOES THE FUTURE LOOK?
  Since your novel Heiland was published in 1986 nearly 17 years have passed.  That was both a utopian and a dystopian novel -- you showed a vision of the future with a totalitarian state and a free state living side by side.  As your insight has grown over the intervening years, how would you change that vision now?  What would you add or subtract?
   
• HOG-TIED, HOG-WALLERIN’, HOG WILD HOGWASH
  Hogwash – it irritates me down to my toenails, and tidal waves of it flood the Internet.  The Internet needs a bouncer on the door carrying a big uglystick to pound the snot out of these people and keep ‘em out.  They float some speculation, then anchor a story to it as if it were an acknowledged pillar of the universe, build an aircastle skyward from there, and then pose next to the completed invention as a public benefactor.
   
• BUSH & GOD By Franklin Sanders
  No, I’m not talking about the burning bush, I’m talking about George Bush, the president.  There he was praying on the cover of Newsweek (March 10, 2003) under the headline “Bush & God.” Subtitles said, “How faith changed his life and shapes his presidency” and “Why his `God Talk’ worries friends & foes.”
   
• THE IMPERIAL ROAD: ORIGINS OF THE  PAX AMERICANA
  Assyria has many connections with the present war.  Iraq occupies much of the territory of the ancient Assyrian empire.  The Assyrian Empire was distinguished not only by its administrative innovation, but also by its superior military technology, brutal cruelty, and policy of relocating peoples for conquest and consolidation.  Are there any parallels to instruct us today?
   
• ANOTHER GOSPEL
  “The Christian body in America is immersed in a crisis of biblical illiteracy,” warns researcher George Barna.  “How else can you describe matters when most churchgoing adults reject the accuracy of the Bible, reject the existence of Satan, claim that Jesus sinned, see no need to evangelise, believe that good works are one of the keys to persuading God to forgive their sins, and describe their commitment to Christianity as moderate or even less firm?”
   
• COLLECTIVE GUILT: BEWARE THE POOFTER AMONG YE
  The Nifty Nine have adopted the libertarian theory that freedom consists in doing whatever I want as long as it hurts no one else – the so-called consenting adult doctrine.  This sounds very smart and very clever until we look closer.
   
• VANDALS WITHOUT FACES
  The virus phenomenon is a purely modern phenomenon, spawned by the technology that makes it possible.  Even as the modern mind and way of thinking is abstract, that is, divorced from bodily reality, so this evil is purely abstract.  It presents malice without knowledge, hatred without object, vandals without faces.
   
• THE SILENT GENOCIDE
  What I had run up against was not just Third World incompetence, but also the trend in customer services.  That's right, industry after industry is closing down its customer service operations in the United States, and moving them to India or other low wage countries.
   
• Thirteen Players 
  Ten times a year the world’s central banking elite meets in Basel, Switzerland for a night of fun, frolic, fellowship – and "secret conversations that can shape the course of the global economy."
   
• Bush or Gore
  (We know this is old, but it's not out of date...) 
  Watching the presidential tussle, I swing between utter terror and wry amusement. On the one hand, terror fills me as I watch the transition from (the pretense of) elections to unabashed mob rule. On the other hand, it’s bitterly amusing to watch newscasters act as if it made any difference which stooge seats himself in the Oval Office.
   
• Your Guide to Hoi Cultcher 
  A little more than 30 years ago my benefactor Uncle Sam decided I had soaked up enough education for a while and needed some military training. Twenty-two months, twenty-eight days, and eight and a half hours later, I pulled away from Fort Campbell, pockets stuffed with my last months’ pay ($236.00).
   
• Computer Games Stunt Brains
  By Tracy McVeigh, Education editorSunday August 19, 2001The [UK] Observer Hi-tech maps of the mind show that computer games are damaging brain development and could lead to children being unable to control violent behaviour.
   
• The USA Patriot Act - Magna Carta Overthrown!
  On Friday, October 25, 2001, that black day in American history, George Bush signed into law the hilariously misnamed USA Patriot Act into law.  With that act, Bush and the US congress betrayed the American people to tyranny.  Whether they realise it or not, they are systematically dismantling Magna Carta, keystone of a thousand year heritage of liberty.
   
• Managing Us - We're So Easy by Fred Reed
  The crucial truths of the current age may be these: First, people will watch any television rather than no television. Second, sooner or later they will begin to imitate what they see on the screen. Third...
   
• Sex & Property by G. K. Chesterton
  In the dull, dusty, stale, stiff-jointed and lumbering language to which most modern discussion is limited, it is necessary to say that there is at this moment the same fashionable fallacy about Sex and about Property.  In the older and freer language, in which men could both speak and sing, it is truer to say that the same evil spirit has blasted the two great powers that make the poetry of life:  the love of Woman and the Love of the Land.
   
• Is the Revolution Really Here 
  The most widely accepted argument rationalizing the Internet & technology stock bubble is that these stocks ought to trade at absurd valuations because new technology will make everything so much more profitable. Pile on the Internet and presto! things will become more profitable still.