There are many powers in this world. Which ones am I feeding with my time, attention, money, energy?

Cheap man’s mocha: half a mug brewed coffee, half a mug milk (I used oatmilk), 1 tablespoon cocoa, 1 tablespoon sugar.

I’ve added “The Owens House” as a blog category to contain all posts about the history of our house. This will interest exactly one reader of this blog (Rachel)–who will also not like the fact that I’ve called it the Owens House. But I like it, and it’s my blog, so there.

I recently wrote a bit about the Schroers, who were the second family to live in our house. Over the weekend, there was a tour of some of the local historic churches and one of them was First Presbyterian, where Dr. Schroer was a deacon. We definitely wanted to go to that one because we knew from this news clipping that his wife and daughter donated a baptismal font after his death:

Thankfully, it was still there:

We were glad to be able to give the members of the church a bit more background information on their baptismal font in exchange for adding a couple of images to our house lore.

What if Trump isn’t lying so much as attempting to shape reality around himself? We know he was influenced by Norman Vincent Peale. It wouldn’t be far from that to something like New Thought. UPDATE: See here for an article linking Trump with New Thought.

Alan Jacobs:

I cannot, of course, provide documentary proof for that claim. But as the Marxists used to say I believe it is no accident that the shaking of the foundations of the global economy and “the longest period of declining real incomes in recorded economic history” happened just as the iPhone was taking serious hold on the imagination of the developed world, and Facebook and Twitter were becoming key components of everyday life in that world. On your smartphones you can get (a) a stream of prompts for visceral wrath and fear and then (b) games and distractions that accomplish the suddenly-necessary self-soothing. Between the wrath and fear and the subsequent soothing, who can remember what happened last week, much less ten years ago? Silicon Valley serves the global capitalist order as its Ministry of Amnesia. “What is it I was so concerned about?”

We got all festive today! This morning we cut our Christmas tree and decorated it. This is our second year with a live tree and I think we’re officially converts. We also set up a Yule space (pictured is the Yule log centerpiece). We’ve been looking into some Yule traditions and developing a plan.

Good essay from @tinyroofnail:

But here again Farmer stands out as an example. He did not begin by trying to change the world, but by applying himself to something relatively small. Whether in Haiti or in downtown Augusta, each of us can be inspired to do the same.

Jamie Dimon says AI will lead to shorter work weeks. We’ve heard this one before. Screw you, Jamie Dimon.

Watching the turmoil of my 78 year old mom has made me utterly certain that the doctrine of eternal, conscious torment in hell preached by fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity is cruel. I live and breathe religion and religious ideas, but that one is dangerous and wicked.

Wendell Berry:

This book, like several others I have written, is intended as a part of a public conversation about the relationship of our lives, and of our communal and economic life, to the lands we live from. That no such public conversation exists presently, or has existed for the last sixty or seventy years, has never been, and is not now, an obstacle to my “contribution.”

Going to the store on a Saturday with some small plumbing part in hand always makes me think of my dad. Of course, now I’m going to Lowe’s instead of the little hardware store in Oolitic but, still, a good memory. The smell and feel of those classic hardware stores was wonderful.

Wendell Berry’s characterization of agrarianism (from his introduction to The Art of Loading Brush):

1. An elated, loving interest in the use and care of the land, and in all the details of the good husbandry of plants and animals.
2. An informed and conscientious submission to nature, or to Nature, and her laws of conservation, frugality, fullness or completeness, and diversity.
3. The wish, the felt need, to have and to belong to a place of one’s own as the only secure source of sustenance and independence. (The freed slaves who pled for “forty acres and a mule” were more urgently and practically agrarian than the “Twelve [white] Southerners.")
4. From that to a persuasion in favor of economic democracy, a preference for enough over too much.
5. Fear and contempt of waste of every kind and its ultimate consequence in land exhaustion. Waste is understood as human folly, an insult to nature, a sin against the given world and its life.
6. From that to a preference for saving rather than spending as the basis of the economy of a household or a government.
7. An assumption of the need for a subsistence or household economy, so as to live so far as possible from one’s place.
8. An acknowledged need for neighbors and a willingness to be a neighbor. This comes from proof by experience that no person or family or place can live alone.
9. A living sense of the need for continuity of family and community life in place, which is to say the need for the survival of local culture and thus of the safekeeping of local memory and local nature.
10. Respect for work and (as self-respect) for good work. This implies an understanding of one’s life’s work as a vocation and a privilege, as opposed to a “job” and a vacation.
11. A lively suspicion of anything new. This contradicts the ethos of consumerism and the cult of celebrity. It is not inherently cranky or unreasonable.

Bless Brother Ali. He can be righteously angry on one track and beautifully moving on another. Indeed, using your heart for what hearts are for.

Ferdinand, IN

I’ve found my Amish lumber source! A guy named Emmanuel. His lumber is a fraction of the Lowe’s price. Part of that is because I’m getting rough sawn lumber from a sawmill but, still, so much cheaper. And planing rough sawn boards to a finish is a skill I’ve been wanting to pick up.

More from Uncle Wendell:

I imagine the dead waking, dazed, into a shadowless light in which they know themselves altogether for the first time. It is a light that is merciless until they can accept its mercy; by it they are at once condemned and redeemed. It is Hell until it is Heaven. Seeing themselves in that light, if they are willing, they see how far they have failed the only justice of loving one another; it punishes them by their own judgement. And yet, in suffering that light’s awful clarity, in seeing themselves within it, they see its forgiveness and its beauty, and are consoled. In it they are loved completely, even as they have been, and so are changed into what they could not have been but what, if they could have imagined it, they would have wished to be.

Wendell Berry, A World Lost:

However we may miss and mourn the dead, we really give little deference to death. “Death,” a friend of mine said as he approached it himself, “is a convention … not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records.” The dead remain in thought as much alive as they ever were, and yet increased in stature and grown remarkably near. The older I have got and the better acquainted among the dead, the plainer it has become to me that I live in the company of immortals.

Claire Carlson, “Rural America Did not Push Donald Trump to Victory in 2024”:

This data speaks for itself: Trump won because Democratic turnout in the core counties of major cities crumbled. Yet the urban resentment toward rural America is back.

Also, see this.

Wendell Berry, A World Lost:

From Dick I learned that the countryside was inhabited not just by things we ordinarily see but also by things we ordinarily do not see—such as foxes. That it was haunted by old memories I already knew.

Foxhunting with Dick, he on my grandfather’s mare and I on Beauty the pony, I first came into the presence of the countryside at night, and learned to think of it as the hunters knew it, and learned there were foxes abroad in it who knew it as no human ever would. There would be an occasional dog fox, Dick said, who would venture up almost to the yard fence to invite the hounds to run, and who, when the hounds accepted the challenge, knew how to baffle them by running in a creek or along the top of a rock fence. I had from Dick a vision of a brilliant fox running gaily through the dark over the ridges and along the hollows, followed by hounds in beautiful outcry, and this to me was a sort of doctrineless mystery and grace.

But what I remember most, and most gratefully, is Dick’s own presence, for he was a man fully present in the place and its yearly round of work that connected hayfield and grainfield and feed barn and hog lot, woods and woodpile and the wood box behind the kitchen stove, well and drinking trough. When the work was to be done, he was there to do it. He did it well and without haste; when it was done he took his ease and did not complain.

Remember when I built a house for our sickly neighborhood cat Morty? He came by on Halloween but we haven’t seen him since…

This is an excellent, excellent post by Donny. The Jonah Goldberg piece he links to is also worth your time. What we need is some sympathetic imagination. Maybe it’s too soon to ask for it, but we’ll need to get around to it quickly. The lack of it is one of the sources of our present troubles.

I could go on a rant about these crap junction boxes, which we tried to work on at my mom’s house today. Suffice it to say that it’s yet another example of building with no regard to future repairability. It’s mind boggling, especially when a simple 2x4 instead of that metal bar would be far better.

Worth your time: An hourlong documentary covering four seasons in the life of a 76 year old horse logger. That channel has several good videos on traditional skills, if you have an interest in that.

There’s nothing like having your preferred candidate unexpectedly trounced for making you re-evaluate your news sources. Some recent posts from people doing such a re-evaluation:

• Patrick Rhone (lots of good comments on this one)
• Jason Heppler
• The third point of this Adam Kotsko post
• This from Alan Jacobs, which is from a year ago but has sparked some of the reflection above. And speaking of Jacobs, I see that I wrote a post in response to another of his discussions of this issue a couple of years ago.

I already don’t consume a lot of news and I don’t plan to start now. It’s tempting to have my employer pay for an Economist subscription under the guise of keeping up to date on financial news–but I doubt I would read it. But if you’re looking to take the periodicity route, don’t forget your local library. I stopped in at mine this morning to see what newspapers and magazines they have available. Of the ones I have any interest in, they only had The Atlantic. Still, it’s a small town library; yours may have more options.