The Pokey Finger of God

I recently received a comment to this site that I deleted, due to a fake email address. The comment was to my State Cult Hypothesis post from two years ago. The entire comment read as follows:
“This has got to be the dumbest thing I have ever read. I would like to leave a detailed [...]

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I’m still dwelling on the intentional community thing. Folks have been suggesting known ICs to investigate, and I appreciate that. One of my comments asked what time frame I had in mind for ‘moving off the grid’, but I never responded because I haven’t considered that question. I think I would go as soon as [...]

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I’ve been reading another Michael Pollan interview. He’s the guy with the radical, seven-word nutritional theory:
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
Naturally, anything this simple must be accompanied by a book which explains what food is, how to attain a leafy-plant based diet, and how to learn self-control at the plate. Pollan also make an [...]

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“It hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be,” Barron said. “I really wasn’t for beer. `Course, we had the country club here and I didn’t like that either.”source

Highway 87 drains out of Lubbock through Dawson County and past the happy little town of Lamesa. Like most of West Texas, Dawson County fortunes [...]

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My current book is Michael Grant’s The Etruscans, self-published in 1980. His view of urban development is very organic, seeing it as a disorganized collection of little steps rather than a tidy, straight-line shift. Unlike other writers, who have the Etruscans pop fully-developed from the head of the Alps, Grant describes how the Etruscans represented [...]

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Just to note, that as it is practiced in America, philanthropy is not a gift economy.
In America –
1. Funding is only provided in context of achieving some goal
2. Funding is distributed based on needs assessments
3. Funding must be spent within a time frame long enough to diminish the value of the funding over that time [...]

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Principles of Gift Economy
1. Gifts are given without anticipation of reward
2. Gifts are given without assessment of need
3. Gifts must not be kept / Gifts must be perishable
4. Gifts must not be sold
5. Those who do not give gifts are shunned from the community
6. The gift not yet repaid debases the receiver
7. The gift circle [...]

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Mom asked me about this, and I rarely need much incentive to rant uncontrollably about the Zionist conspiracy. Heh, heh. “Where does it explain,” she asked, looking at my newest historical atlas, “why the Jews think God gave them that land?” I couldn’t break it down into a ten-second answer, so I think I changed [...]

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I was at Ruta Maya on Sunday with and our families (they’ve got a kid’s show every Sunday morning — very entertaining!) when he finds there and shares with me a booklet with a 13-month, lunar calendar with a brochure proclaiming they were “solving the evolutionary crisis”. Being previously unaware of an “evolutionary crisis”, [...]

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