In 1995, under Bill Clinton, the Boskin Commission — led by a former economic adviser to the first President Bush — was formed to “fix” the way we measure CPI. Changes were quietly made, with little Congressional oversight; ostensibly, they were to improve accuracy, but their net result was a dramatic reduction of the “official” [...]

From the Farms Not Arms website: Jim Dunlop may have brought some demons with him after serving as a Marine in the first Iraq war in 1990. But he says he’s worked them out raising free-ranging pigs and laying hens on a 20-acre farm in Las Lomas. Dunlop is a living example of what the [...]

From The Essential Agrarian Reader: The modern image of the knower and ethical agent as one who constructs a blueprint of how the world ought to be, and then remakes the world according to his or her own design, simply misunderstands and forfeits a philosophical life. This is life without wisdom, guilty of a basic [...]

New “gifts” for bridesmaids: plastic surgery Apparently there’s some new trend of brides getting their bridesmaids Botox and plastic surgery and the like before the big day. You know, just in case American weddings weren’t enough about unrealistic expectations, consumerism and all-around bizarreness.* Some brides pick up the tab for their attendants, replacing the pillbox [...]

From the News & Observer SANFORD – The 14 chickens in Alexandra Reid’s backyard are an orderly flock, content to spend their days quietly scratching in their fenced coop and their evenings roosting in their tidy house. Not so their owner, who has been running about like one of her charges with its head cut [...]

Catastrophe: n. 1. A great, often sudden calamity. 2. A complete failure; a fiasco: The food was cold, the guests quarreled–the whole dinner was a catastrophe. 3. The concluding action of a drama, especially a classical tragedy, following the climax and containing a resolution of the plot. 4. A sudden violent change in the earth’s [...]

(from Anathoth Community Garden’s brochure) “plant gardens and eat what they produce … seek the shalom of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its shalom you will find your shalom.” (Jer. 29:5,7) Thanks to the generosity and vision of a Cedar Grove [...]

Here in North Carolina, female soldiers are being murdered… some by their military spouses. This past January, police were led to the burnt body of Marine Lance Corporal Maria Lauterbach at Jacksonville, NC, just outside of Camp Lejeune. Suspected of murder is her husband, Marine Corporal Cesar Laurean, who fled to Mexico when the body [...]

We’ve had some kind of a weird malf of the WordPress database here at FS. The obvious symptom is that comments are not visible on any of our threads. The WP software thinks there are no comments on the blog as a whole. This is obviously nonsense, as the mysql backups show over 300KB of [...]