And this is why I’ve grown to love the big, thick books with tiny print–because I know I needn’t put the work down permanently after three days because I’ve finished it, but that I can savor the story for weeks. I’ve just begun Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter, a work in three volumes. It’s nice and thick, and will take me a while to get through

–just the way I like it.

However, the modern distributist-minded homesteader has a bit of a problem. Unlike earlier times, rural dwellers today are as dependent upon the city as city dwellers are dependent upon the country. For better or worse, our “advanced” economy has created a civilization of complex and inescapable interdependence. For the rural dweller, the only way out of his dependence upon the city is to drop out of civilization altogether.

This is intuitively obvious and should go without saying, but there are a few die-hard agrarian romantics who might benefit from seeing it spelled out for them.

So, you have moved to the country and want to create a life that does not depend upon the city. Very well. Are you fond of electric lights and indoor plumbing? This technology requires large-scale manufacturing and population centers. Same goes for toilet paper, toothpaste, refrigerators, coffee cups, and the electric pump for your domestic well. Same goes for your pickup truck and the wire for your chicken coop. Not to mention the distributist books on your bookshelf. I suppose, if you had to, you could manufacture your own home furniture and farm implements, but the fact is that you probably don’t have the time, resources, or talent to do so, and you depend upon city-based manufacturing for these things as well. By now, I hope, you get the idea.

What I mean is this: no matter what degree of “independence” your rural homestead has attained, it will still be radically dependent upon the city and all that goes on in the city. The country may provide a good and wholesome life for your children and some degree of insularity from city problems, and that is a very good thing – but it does not really protect anyone from a national or worldwide economic collapse. If the lights went out in America for a year, there would be famine and disaster and ruin everywhere. Country dwellers, too, would feel the pain as their supply of everything from diesel fuel to flashlight batteries to toliet paper ran out and they were forced to find primitive alternatives like everyone else.

The rural American Catholic, then, must be a defender of cities because he is a defender of civilization. He can flee the cities, but he can’t forsake them. He must work for their welfare and pray for their redemption. This radical interdependence is with us whether we like it or not, and so even in the absence of charity (Heaven forbid it), raw self-interest requires the rural dweller to take a special interest in the spiritual and temporal health of our cities.

The Oslo Airport in Norway has decided to pull the Flowerbomb fragrance by Viktor & Rolf from duty-free shelves.

The Oslo Airport in Norway has decided to pull the Flowerbomb fragrance by Viktor & Rolf from the shelves of its duty-free boutiques.

The grenade-like shape of the Flowerbomb bottle falls into the category of unauthorized items such as “weapons or objects that look like weapons” that cannot pass security controls, explains airport spokesperson to Cosmeticnews.com.

Airport’s security rules in Oslo are very tight.

“Another example is a simple child’s water gun, which is also unauthorized,” spokesperson added.

I find this hilariously funny, could you see any self respecting terrorist pulling this fake ‘grenade’ out of their handbag and threaten to stink out a plane!

What next you can’t park your rusty old van at Luton airport’s parking facility because sterotypically only a criminal drives something that beat up!!

Pretty sure I saw that van at Luton airport last week as well, no I tell a lie it was Heathrow airport and there was a bloke who looked a lot like Jack Bauer (from 24) following it

The Andhra Pradesh government has decided to enforce high security number plates for all vehicles in the state.

The new number plates, to be introduced in six months, would also have the chassis and engine numbers of the vehicle, apart from the registration number, according to sources.

Officials of the police and transport departments met recently and decided to introduce the new number plates in view of the increasing naxal attack and vehicle theft problems.

This seems like such a good idea generally, could help reduce the dangers of purchasing a stolen car with a fake car number plates, especially where a same make and model of car is stolen and the plates are switched, so why don’t we have something like this in the UK?

“There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things–their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded, and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.

It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in causing each of them to fulfill their respective tasks in the best possible manner. The Americans have applied to the sexes the great principle of political economy which governs the manufacturers of our age, by carefully dividing the duties of man from those of woman in order that the great work of society may be the better carried on.

In no country has such constant care been taken as in America to trace two clearly distinct lines of action for the two sexes and to make them keep pace one with the other, but in two pathways that are always different. American women never manage the outward concerns of the family or conduct a business or take a part in political life; nor are they, on the other hand, ever compelled to perform the rough labor of the fields or to make any of those laborious efforts which demand the exertion of physical strength. No families are so poor as to form an exception to this rule. If, on the one hand, an American woman cannot escape from the quiet circle of domestic employments, she is never forced, on the other, to go beyond it. Hence it is that the women of America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women although they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men.

Nor have the Americans ever supposed that one consequence of democratic principles is the subversion of marital power or the confusion of the natural authorities in families. They hold that every association must have a head in order to accomplish its object, and that the natural head of the conjugal association is man. They do not therefore deny him the right of directing his partner, and they maintain that in the smaller association of husband and wife as well as in the great social community the object of democracy is to regulate and legalize the powers that are necessary, and not to subvert all power.

This opinion is not peculiar to one sex and contested by the other; I never observed that the women of America consider conjugal authority as a fortunate usurpation of their rights, or that they thought themselves degraded by submitting to it. It appeared to me, on the contrary, that they attach a sort of pride to the voluntary surrender of their own will and make it their boast to bend themselves to the yoke, not to shake it off. Such, at least, is the feeling expressed by the most virtuous of their sex; the others are silent; and in the United States it is not the practice for a guilty wife to clamor for the rights of women while she is trampling on her own holiest duties.

It has often been remarked that in Europe a certain degree of contempt lurks even in the flattery which men lavish upon women; although a European frequently affects to be the slave of woman, it may be seen that he never sincerely thinks her his equal. In the United States men seldom compliment women, but they daily show how much they esteem them. They constantly display an entire confidence in the understanding of a wife and a profound respect for her freedom; they have decided that her mind is just as fitted as that of a man to discover the plain truth, and her heart as firm to embrace it; and they have never sought to place her virtue, any more than his, under the shelter of prejudice, ignorance, and fear.

It would seem in Europe, where man so easily submits to the despotic sway of women, that they are nevertheless deprived of some of the greatest attributes of the human species and considered as seductive but imperfect beings; and (what may well provoke astonishment) women ultimately look upon themselves in the same light and almost consider it as a privilege that they are entitled to show themselves futile, feeble, and timid. The women of America claim no such privileges.

Again, it may be said that in our morals we have reserved strange immunities to man, so that there is, as it were, one virtue for his use and another for the guidance of his partner, and that, according to the opinion of the public, the very same act may be punished alternately as a crime or only as a fault. The Americans do not know this iniquitous division of duties and rights; among them the seducer is as much dishonored as his victim.

It is true that the Americans rarely lavish upon women those eager attentions which are commonly paid them in Europe, but their conduct to women always implies that they suppose them to be virtuous and refined; and such is the respect entertained for the moral freedom of the sex that in the presence of a woman the most guarded language is used lest her ear should be offended by an expression. In America a young unmarried woman may alone and without fear undertake a long journey.

The legislators of the United States, who have mitigated almost all the penalties of criminal law, still make rape a capital offense, and no crime is visited with more inexorable severity by public opinion. This may be accounted for; as the Americans can conceive nothing more precious than a woman’s honor and nothing which ought so much to be respected as her independence, they hold that no punishment is too severe for the man who deprives her of them against her will. In France, where the same offense is visited with far milder penalties, it is frequently difficult to get a verdict from a jury against the prisoner. Is this a consequence of contempt of decency or contempt of women? I cannot but believe that it is a contempt of both.

Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value. They do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man, but they never doubt her courage; and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other, and her intellect to be as clear. Thus, then, while they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement.

As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so many important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”

- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America rest here

No one gets fired in Hollywood. I don’t know if you have noticed that. People part company because of “creative differences.” Executives tend to move to another branch of the studio, even if the branch has to be invented. Contract negotiations fall apart. But think about it, when have you ever read the “F” word in the trades, or heard it on Entertainment Tonight?

Which is why I’m stopping strangers on the street to tell them I’ve been fired. I’ve never been fired in my life. I’ve always been one of those people who considers anything less than #1 to be failure. (It has been driving me nuts to come in second to SVU all season, but that’s a rant for another time.) I was valedictorian of my high school, went to one of those colleges that people kill each other to get into, moved to L.A. and got a job working on what was arguably the best show in the history of television at age twenty-four, etc. etc. By any objective standards (you can’t argue with top 20 ratings and 23 scripts in on time) there is no reason that I should have been fired. I think the subjective standards hold up, too. So the spinmeisters will be working overtime to keep from saying the “F” word, which is why I will be saying it every chance I get.

People keep asking me when we will be “officially” fired, since no one has told us. This is how it will work. Our contracts are not up until June 15th. That is the date by which the studio has to pick up our options for next year, or tell us that they will not be doing that. Every other year, our options have been picked up by now. They do that so we won’t go out on other job interviews. This year, my attorney tried to get that date moved up, and the studio wouldn’t budge. It’s a ridiculous date, because writers go back to work (after haitus) at the beginning of June, so shows have hired their staffs by the end of May. If the studio waits until June 15th to tell you that they are not picking up your option, it is too late to get a job somewhere else.

This year, the studio did not pick up any of our options. I kept calling and asking why that hadn’t happened. I was told that CBS had not ordered the show for next year. Last year, I was told it had been ordered for two years. So I don’t know which one of those conflicting statements is the truth. At any rate, none of us has had our options picked up, and everyone else in town who doesn’t have a job for next year has been going to job interviews for weeks.

I don’t know what the original plan was. I have a theory that is not worth going into. But I know the plan was not that the writers would be told by the grips. The big mess happened because it didn’t occur to the people who were doing the “off with their heads” dance that someone on the set might tell us about it. (I said Amy before because she is the only one who has enough power to pull this off, but there she has fellow conspirators with agendas of their own.) Now that the cat is out of the bag, I think they are counting on the fact that we will all be forced to find other jobs before our option date, and no one will ever have to say the nasty “F” word. They will probably say “They all took other jobs based on a ridiculous rumor. They must have been wackos, we’re lucky we’re rid of them.”

As the saying goes, that’s show biz.

There are all sorts of agendas and layers involved in this mess, and grudges that go back way before I ever heard of the show. But if you want the “see Spot run” version of why I was fired (and I was, you know!) it’s this: I will not be owned. I will not take dictation. I do not kiss asses to keep my job.

When the day comes that I have to do any of those things in order to feed my children, I will be packing them up and moving back home.

Before Adam ate his apple,
the flowers had faces.

Before you saw smiles,
but now you just see traces.

Now to see the smiles
you must travel miles.

The devil long before
had destroyed our smiles.

That is why to see them
you must travel miles.

On the way, we stopped by a local orchard and bought a bag of fresh navel oranges and a few jars of homemade jam. The proprietor has three acres of citrus, which he ripens on the tree and sells direct to the consumer in a little roadside store. The store is open for about 6 months out of the year, and also sells locally grown kiwi, mandarins, grapefruit, almonds, pecans, and walnuts. The third-generation owner has a regular job with the sherriff’s department, but he will be retiring next year to work the family business full-time.

We pulled up to the swap meet and parked in front of a large sign that read “Jesus Saves. God Smiles” in English and Spanish. Traditional Mexican music was playing loudly throughout the large parking lot. The first thing we came to was a man selling chickens and doves. The handsome ringnecked doves sell for $7.00 each. He told us that many people like to let them fly around free inside their homes, and told of growing up in just such a home.

Throughout the booths were many people selling beautiful Catholic sacramentals – cheap! And there were tools! New tools, used tools, power tools, hand tools, garden tools, shop tools, all selling for a fraction of what you would pay in a retail store. I bought a pair of heavy work gloves for $1.50. There were also lots of clothes for sale. Children’s clothes sold for bargain-basement prices. Best of all were the produce booths. Farm-fresh produce of every kind, big and small, tasty and colorful. LeXuan was impressed and says she’ll be going back. There were many other things offered that would be useful in a rural homestead.

The vendors were predominantly Mexican or Latin American, with a fair smattering of non-Hispanics. I’m pretty certain that the economic activity taking place was all “under the table”. So far as I know the Saturday swap meet does not advertise. Children work with their parents behind the booths selling their wares. There is a wonderful feeling of freedom in the air: humble people, young and old, mostly good but some bad, just doing what should be a very natural human activity. The swap meet seems to be a re-creation of the “town square” or plaza that has now disappeared in North America. Aside from the trading, it also looks like an important social event for the vendors, the customers, and their families. It’s certainly a great way to spend a Saturday morning.

Some pundits – even so-called conservative pundits – would complain that our town’s swap meet is “third world” or insufficiently middle-classs. They miss the point. It will be a dark day in America when the swap meet, like the town square of our fathers, is squashed in the name of the demon Progress.

“Michael Medved read extracts from portions of his new book, Right Turns, which didn’t make the cut and were edited out. One section had to do with his success as a teenager at selling encyclopedias. He ended the chapter with a brief homily on the key to any success in America was the ability to sell or promote your ideas, your product, your gifts and to close the sale. The most important aspect after all.

He mentioned that people who were too shy or reluctant to sell end up in a pool of self-pity …”

Similar sentiment is reproduced on the VDARE site (not recommended):

“The Wiz looked upon [Croker] as an aging, uneducated, and out-of-date country boy who had somehow, nonetheless, managed to create a large, and, until recently, wildly successful corporation. That the country boy, with half his brainpower, should be the lord of the corporation and that [the Wiz] should be his vassal was an anomaly, a perversity of fate. . . . Or part of him felt that way. The other part of him was in awe, in unconscious awe, of something the old boy had and he didn’t: namely, the power to charm men and the manic drive to bend their wills into saying yes to projects they didn’t want, didn’t need, and never thought about before… And that thing was manhood. It was as simple as that.”

The above comments are illuminating in that they show how important salesmanship is when it comes to American life and the American ideal of masculinity. Successful salesmanship does require strong masculine traits: assertiveness, competitiveness, determination, and so on. Men who do not succeed at sales – who do not know how to “close the sale” or how to “charm men and … bend their wills into saying yes to projects they didn’t want, didn’t need, and never thought about before” – are deemed less masculine than those who do.

This perception is uniquely American. The Old World never questioned the inherent masculinity of intellectual or spiritual pursuits, and had always suspected the trading classes of gaining wealth through cowardly and deceptive methods (hardly ideal masculine traits). The recent equating of masculinity with salesmanship and financial success has more to do with the rise of the bourgeoisie and their values than with masculinity itself.

This might be interepreted as sour grapes on my part, since I’ve tried many kinds of sales and never made much money at it. Yet most sales positions seem to involve some form of dishonesty. Almost every kind of sales I’ve ever done involved trying to mislead people at first, even if prospects were not actually lied to. A salesman is highly incentivized to exaggerate the good and conceal the bad about whatever it is he is selling, and no one today thinks anything of it. It is expected and considered perfectly normal. When I had my Series-3 license and sold commodities futures, I was given a telephone script that asked prospects whether they had received a package we had sent — but no package had ever been sent to them. When I sold businesses, I was trained to contact business owners telling them I had many buyers interested in looking at their business — vaguely true but certainly misleading. When I sold insurance, I was trained to conduct pretend telephone surveys that were sneakily designed to set appointments. When I did multi-level marketing, I was trained to make calls pretending I wanted to talk to people about filling a “management position”. In all cases I was trained to be forthcoming about the good news and close-mouthed about the bad news.

Sooner or later my conscience would begin to bother me and I would just start telling people the truth about things, the pros and the cons, the good and the bad, hoping that they would make up their own minds and still decide to buy whatever it was I was selling. That didn’t work too well, to say the least.

The point is that we have an economic system that rewards lies and punishes truth – and this is considered “masculine”. We have a social structure that rewards those who impose their will upon others and punishes those who respect the integrity of others. Tell the whole unvarnished truth about the product you’re selling, and you can probably forget about financial success. If you’re a defense attorney and you tell the truth about your guilty client, you can certainly forget about winning the case. If you’re a politician and you tell the whole truth about what you believe, you can forget about getting elected (assuming you believe in more than just getting elected). If you’re a job applicant and you are completely candid about your strengths and weaknesses, in most cases you can forget about getting hired. Etc.

We are seeing something of a revival of masculinity. That might be a good thing if it were not a thoroughly pagan, barbarian masculinity that worships power and money instead of Truth. Men who strive for the old cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, courage, and self-control will probably not be experts at “closing the sale”.

“The slavery of economists to the omnipotent Market has resulted in their linking the rate of growth to ‘gross national product’ (GNP). If gross national product increases there is growth in the economy. And, since growth is always considered good, the more the GNP increases the more economists will speak of a ‘healthy economy’ and the more politicians will preen themselves on their success in bringing it about … GNP is the total price (not value, since value is qualitative not quantitative) of all the traded goods and services produced in a country during a year. Any economic activity that does not involve a monetary transaction is not included. On the other hand, any activity that involves the spending of money is included even if it has a detrimental effect in socio-economic terms. This produces a peculiar view of what is deemed ‘economic’.

Preparing meals at home is less ‘economic’ than eating at a restaurant because the latter activity contributes more to GNP. Similarly, all do-it-yourself economies around the home or on the car are in fact ‘uneconomic’ because more economic growth would be recorded if everyone employed builders or garages to do the work. Caring for elderly or disabled people at home within a loving family environment, where they are largely invisible economically, is less ‘economic’ than having their ‘price’ measured in a nursing home. In short, the more people are self-sufficient and not reliant on others, the less they are considered ‘economic’. The more they are dependent on others the higher will be their contribution to GNP. The absurdity of this state of affairs was illustrated by Alvin Toffler in The Third Wave:

‘With respect to pursuit of GNP, an amusing fantasy suggests that women undertake to do each other’s housework and pay each other for it. If every Susie Smith paid every Barbara Brown one hundred dollars a week for caring for her home and children, while receiving an equivalent amount for providing the same services in return, the impact on the Gross National Product would be astounding. If fifty million American housewives engaged in this nonsense transaction it would add about ten percent to the US GNP overnight.’”

– Joseph Pearce, Small is Still Beautiful