Things I tripped over on my way to the internet

California (1971 projects, $23,194,447,831)

Sacramento (30 projects, $2,803,950,000)

via hilker

← hilker ← sabine ← synmirror ← emilyposts

1. Aa. And I don’t mean the acronym for Alcoholics Anonymous, either. Aa is “basaltic lava having a rough surface.”

2. Qat – a flowering plant native to East Africa and the Arabian peninsula.

3. Zax – a slater or slate mason, or the tool used to cut and punch nail holes in roofing slate.

4. Cwm – a valley, especially one created by glacial movement. Be warned: this one won’t get you many points, but it is good for using up pesky, low-score consonants taking up valuable space on your rack.

5. Xu – Vietnamese money

6. Qua – as or as being, or in the character of.

7. Suq – a market, or part of a market, in an Arab city.

8. Adz – an axe-like tool.

9. Jo – sweetheart or dear

10. Qadi – a judge in the Muslim community.

hilker:

“it’s like wikipedia by actual smart people who know what they’re talking about!”

hilker:

Rod Dreher:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

thanks, to this i09 Wall-E post, i think i found a label politic… .

I don’t know about #6 and #7—I’d say that depends—and #10 is a bit vague—what Permanent Things? What moral truths? If this is referring to the principles of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God” referred to in the Declaration then, I’m game—otherwise, spot on.

hilker:

the article brings up three main points:

• Problem 1: Men’s earnings
• Problem 2 and Good Development 1: Women’s increased presence in the paid labor market
• Problem 3: Faster price growth for some important stuff

not being an economist, these all make sense. but from a social perspective, i think the biggest cause is that we’ve learned to live beyond our means, or failed to act our wage. it’s not so much the cost of goods that plays such a big role (though that’s an increasingly important factor as basic goods grow scarce), but the lifestyle which we’ve grown accustomed to. i understand that it’s harder in more metropolitan areas, but still, i think that our consumption-and entertainment-driven lifestyles play a huge role in how far our paychecks go.

given, the federal government & the fed have done a masterful job of manipulating the economy into a black hole, but i can’t blame them for my hunger when i won’t give up my cable tv. 

Um, hardly “impossible”. I know plenty of people that are doing it right now. I think hilker’s exactly right about what makes it harder but it’s not impossible.