Confessions of Front-Porch Realist

Ardent localist am I! This much is obvious, I am sure, to anyone who has followed this Weblog or read my contributions at Post Right. Although I have recently been absent from the comment boxes at Front Porch Republic (not to mention from blogging, as well as most other intellectual pursuits), I remain one of [...]

Paging Jeremy Beer: Indiana-born Miss America 2009, Agrarian

The whole Miss America thing usually doesn’t interest me much, but, while sitting in my grandfather’s living room, I noticed something in the 3 July issue of Indiana AgriNews that really piqued my interest: Katie Stam, Miss America 2009, is the first to hail from Indiana. More important (Yes, even more important than some Hoosier [...]

Why I Advocate the Return to Popularity of the Waistcoat

I told a reporter here a while back — young girl, seemed nice enough. She was just tryin to be a reporter. She said: Sheriff how come you to let crime get so out of hand in your county? Sounded like a fair question I reckon. Maybe it was a fair question. Anyway I told [...]

My recent work at Post Right

“Friedersdorf on Happy Meal-Conservative Talk Radio”: Conor ably calls out Mark Levin, et alios
“Caritas in Veritate“: Pope Benedict has a social encyclical due at month’s end.
“Call Me Skeptical”: Netanyahu, in my humble estimation, is a snake. A “sovereign” Palestine, as he envisions it, will be no freer of Israel than George W. Bush was [...]

Neighborhood Schools, Local Business

Over at The League, the (extra)ordinary Mr. Kain has a splendid piece on “the concept of the school itself as an essential part of one’s community.” It is, rest assured, well worth the read. (At Front Porch Republic, Professor Fox offered, a couple of months ago, the very interesting “A Partially Localist Defense of Public [...]

Wendell Berry, Kirkian

From “The Use of Energy”, in The Art of the Commonplace:
The energy that is made available to us by the living things, on the other hand, is made available not as an inconceivable quantity, but as a conceivable pattern. […] It was mastered, better than our scientific experts have mastered it, by “primitive” peasants and [...]

Support Your Daily Source of Principled Conservatism

Last month, the editors of The American Conservative announced that without a significant increase in financial resources, this bastion of reasoned thought on the Right would go under. Happily, they announced that, having enjoyed most generous responses from their readership, TAC will survive, although now as a monthly, rather than bi-weekly publication.
Recently, John Schwenkler’s [...]

Being Home.

Ah, rural Indiana! Fresh air; crystal-clear, star-filled skies; people who, rather puzzlingly, think highly of me. Not even forty-eight hours home, I heard that Ray’s Super Foods “needs” for me to return. For reasons best left unpublished, I cannot return to that place, as important as it is to me (See below, natch.); however, I [...]

I shall not attend the University’s campus-wide commencement

The secular Left PWNs us now.
There will be no more prayer at the campus-wide commencement ceremony after the University Senate voted to eliminate the practice yesterday.

The senate approved a proposal that eliminates a prayer invocation at the university’s annual commencement ceremony in a 32-14 vote after a lengthy debate that touched on the [...]

Porn, Rights, and Higher Education Or, Thank God I’m Gone in Two Months

The University of Maryland: Our basketball team fails; featuring two socialists, a communist, and left-liberal constitutes intellectual diversity, and we like to show xxx-rated porn on campus.