Poseidon Adventure New Years

Hope your new year goes better than this:

I saw this as a kid at the drive-in and nightmares about it.

Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson and Gene Lodgson

This is a few months away, but think it is pretty significant to get these 3 guys together in one place:

Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson and Gene Logsdon
Sunday, April 11, 2010, 7:00 pm
“An Informal Conversation”
Co-sponsored by the UC's President's Advisory Council on Environment and Sustainability and the Brueggeman Center for Dialogue

Wendell Berry is a Kentucky farmer and writer, described by the New York Review of Books as “perhaps the great moral essayist of our day.” He is the author of more than forty novels, anthologies of essays, and books of poetry that use his intimate knowledge of his Kentucky River farm home as the starting point for eloquent and penetrating critiques of the modern agricultural system and its consequences for communities, families, and politics. Wes Jackson is the President and co-founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, a research and demonstration center dedicated to developing polyculture perennial grains as an alternative to our current annual grain monocultures. Gene Logsdon farms in northern Ohio and has written numerous books and magazine articles on the subject of small farms, rural living, cottage farming, homesteading, alternative farming practices, organic gardening, composting, aquaculture, and other types of alternative agriculture.

All lectures are held in the Cintas Center and are free and open to the public.

More Carnage with Cars or Terrorists

Trying to add a little perspective to the terrorist threat:

In 2008 there were 34,017 deaths (and nearly 100,000 major injuries) related to automobile accidents in the United States. Terrorists would have to blow up 113 Boeing 777-200s each year in order to kill that many people! That is, they'd have to blow up all but six of the 777-200's (which hold 301 people in a 3-tier international setup) currently owned by American Airlines, United Airlines and Continental Airlines (together they own 119 777-200s) and would have to do so every single year, which is probably faster than they can be built...

More along this line of reasoning from Yglesias.

High Cost of Ignoring Beauty

....People need beauty. They need the sense of being at home in their world, and being in communication with other souls. In so many areas of modern life—in pop music, in television and cinema, in language and literature—beauty is being displaced by raucous and attention-grabbing clichés. We are being torn out of ourselves by the loud and insolent gestures of people who want to seize our attention but to give nothing in return for it. Although this is not the place to argue the point it should perhaps be said that this loss of beauty, and contempt for the pursuit of it, is one step on the way to a new form of human life, in which taking replaces giving, and vague lusts replace real loves. -Roger Scruton