The City

This is what a City looks like: pictures of Prague by Libor Sváček.

Pournelle and Mackenzie on preserving civilization

From scifi author Jerry Pournelle in the March 1983 number of Survive magazine:

Probably the most valuable book I own is MacKenzie's 10,000 Formulas. Published in 1868, it has 400 pages telling how to make everything known about at the time. The section on medicines is useful only for amusement, but MacKenzie shows how to butcher animals, smoke and preserve meat, make soap, gunpowder and fireworks, and how to brew beer–from choosing the barley and hops to malting the barley ("Throw the malt up into a heap as high as possible, where let it lie till it grows as hot as the hand can bear it, which usually happens in the space of about 30 hours"). Alas, nothing else like MacKenzie's book seems to be available.

Here's a link to the Google Books copy of Mackenzie, along with its magnificent subtitle:

Mackenzie's ten thousand receipts: in all the useful and domestic arts constituting a complete and practical library, relating to agriculture, angling, bees, bleaching, book-keeping, brewing, cotton culture, crocheting, carving, cholera, cooking, calico printing, confectionery, cements, chemical receipts, cosmetics, diseases, dairy, dentistry, dialysis, decalcomania, dyeing, distillation, enamelling, engraving, electro-plating, electrotyping, fish culture, farriery, food, flower gardening, fireworks, gas metres, gilding, glass, health, horsemanship, inks, jewellers' paste, knitting, knots, lithography, mercantile calculations, medicine, miscellaneous receipts, metallurgy, mezzotints, oil colors, oils, painting, perfumery, pastry, petroleum, pickling, poisons and antidotes, potichomania, proof-reading, pottery, preserving, photography, pyrotechnics, rural and domestic economy, sugar raising, silvering, scouring, silk and silk-worms, sorghum, tobacco culture, tanning, trees, telegraphing, varnishes, vegetable gardening, weights and measures, wines, etc., etc., being an entirely new edition carefully revised and re-written, and containing the improvements and discoveries up to last date of publication, January, 1867.

Urban farming in Detroit

• Yeoman Farmer
• Guernica: Food Among the Ruins
• New York Times: The $100 House
• Sweet Juniper: Streets With No Name

Get your laws off our sacraments

Just something I stumbled across in my archives from 2003:

I don't think government should claim any authority over marriage, which is not only a sacrament but an integral part of the natural law, which precedes and supercedes any claims of government. The government has no more right to define the nature of marriage than it has to define the nature of, say, the Eucharist.

Give the government that power [to regulate marriage], and soon enough it will attempt to define the nature of the Eucharist; it will define our prayers and worship as child abuse, our Scriptures as hate speech, our acts of charity as crimes against humanity, and so on.

Digitized manuscripts

Vide. Links to all 8C-15C manuscripts that have been digitized and put on the web. Background here.

Moloch returns

Rand Simberg describes what's really going on in Gaza as civilization tries once again to defeat evil.