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Norman Borlaug has died, and Joe Carter calls him the world's greatest unknown hero and says that "few men have ever done more good for the human race."  He links…

Wichita, KS I just returned from my near-annual pilgrimage to the American Political Science Association's annual convention...this year held, ironically enough, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. I didn't mind--it meant I'd…

Ah, September.  The enervating heat of August is less, and school starts up again with all the hopefulness and energy of a new academic year.  I still feel the year…

We set up here on the porch six months ago today. Many words later, it's still a nice place to relax and shoot the breeze. To mark the occasion, a…

This fellow has some nice things to say about what we've been up to here on the porch. So let me return the favor and thank him, first, for noticing,…

Our fellow Porcher Rod Dreher says Dick Cheney is an outlaw. Of course he is right, after a certain manner of speaking, and I have no particular comment one way…

From the indispensable Joe Bageant: "Dottie is doping out the Romney [WV] medical establishment for me: 'These Indians or Pakis or whatever they are run the hospital like it was…

From The American Conservative---you really should subscribe, you know---my piece (www.amconmag.com/article/2009/sep/01/00050/) on the great Kentucky actor Warren Oates.

If you listen to mainstream "conservatives" in America today, the poster-boy for the movement is, of course, Ronald Reagan. "We need a new Reagan revolution" they spout. "We need to…

68 apparently.  I had to laugh when I saw this.  I recognize many of them as my interlocutors from the old New Pantagruel days.  And if I learned anything, it…

Posted originally as a comment to Patrick Deneen's "Road Rage" (and re-posted here at his insistence): The State of Oregon Highway Comm. had a wonderful engineer named Conde McCullough who…

Here is an interview from The Guardian. Blond has the ear of David Cameron, calls himself a Red Tory, and is launching a new think tank in the fall. Do…

I'm still on my summer blogging hiatus, but this artifact was too good to pass up.  Seen at local post office this afternoon.

Michael Pollan doesn't know what he's talking about and neither do the millions of his soft-handed readers. So says a farmer here. One wonders, though, what Wendell Berry and Joel…

College graduates are certainly learning something - all that resume padding isn't worth a bucket of spit when all the imaginary jobs that kept people busy moving around notional financial…

Jesse Walker, managing editor of Reason, is one of my favorite writers on matters cultural and political. His fugitive essays for No Depression, the magazine of American music, have just been collected…

If you're lucky enough to be near beautiful Allegany County, New York, over the weekend of August 7-9, drop by Alfred University to check out the New York Green Fest…

Here is Schumacher discussing Buddhist economics. He admits that he could have called it Christian economics, but then no one would have read it. H/T The Western Confucian.

Most media outlets have treated the financial crisis as a consequence of Wall Street Gone Wild. However, this New Yorker article suggests - I think rightly - that the world's…

As so often seems to be the case, the Monty Python troop somehow managed to make Matthew Crawford's point about the enduring value of working with your hands decades before…

Several years ago I (sarcastically) noted a hot trend in the DC Metropole - the outsourcing of many mundane tasks seen as superfluous and distracting from the busy lifestyles of…

Joe Carter weighs in at First Things with a set of challenging reservations about the relevance of Matt Crawford's arguments for a more general audience. He rightly notes that it's…

I must apologize to all our readers and my fellow contributors here for the intrusion of my cousin Cassie Pigeon in a recent post under my byline. I had my extended…