Anglosphere

Quote of the Day: John Robb

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Global transition points like this are so rare, it’s a great time to be alive.

John Robb

Right on. Yes. Yes.

More of this type of thinking, please.

If I could live at any time in history it would be now.

(If you are not a regular reader of Mr. Robb’s Global Guerrillas, get that way.)

(Also check out Mr. Robb’s way cool new Wiki MiiU, which is all about resilience. I eagerly await his book on resilient communities.)

(Here is an xcellent John Robb talk about open source ventures, but full disclosure, a lot of it sailed over my head.)

(And if you have not read his book, Brave New War: The Next Stage of Terrorism and the End of Globalization, go get it.)

Friends, please let me know in the comments, on a scale of 1 to 5, strongly disagree to strongly agree, how you respond to this quote. Put me down as a 5, obviously enough.

The Grand Adventure

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“You’ll simply have to read his books, if you want to understand about Greece,” my next-door neighbor told me, very shortly after my then-three year old daughter and I settled into Kyrie Panayotis’ first floor flat (which is Brit-speak for second-floor apartment) at the corner of Knossou and Delphon streets in the Athens suburb of Ano Glyphada, early in the spring of 1983. Kyrie Panayoti did not speak any English; neither did his wife, or his wife’s sister, Kyria Yiota, who lived upstairs with her husband. The only inhabitants of the three-story apartment house who did were Kyrie Panayoti’s middle-school aged sons, who were learning English at school. And I dullard that I am with languages aside from my native one only retained a few scraps of high-school and college German. Given the modern history of Greece, and the long memories of older Greeks, a German vocabulary was neither tactful nor useful.

London Burning

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Another night, another night of riots, arson and casual lootery, relatively untrammeled by the efforts of law enforcement, and perhaps slightly slowed down by the efforts of massed local residents and business owners. After three or four nights of this destruction, which leaves the internet plastered with pictures that look like the aftermath of the WWII Blitz, I would have hoped that the local residents were beginning to assemble and barricade their streets, rather than leave them open for the ‘hoodies’ to do their worst.

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Declaration of Independence

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My annual act of civic piety is to read the Declaration on July 4. I have it in several places, including the Documentary Source Book of American History, 1606-1913 (1925) edited by William MacDonald, Professor of History in Brown University. College kids used to read the original source documents as a first year course. God help us. I was perusing the documentary record leading up to the Declaration. It was building up for a long time. The thing was not going to end happily.

The signers of the Declaration did not get to sit on their porch in a peaceable and prosperous country (drinking a rather stiff vodka and tonic) and being relatively carefree about it. They were making a hard decision to embark on open war with the most powerful country in the world, with a good chance of being beaten, hounded and harried, their wealth destroyed, their families scattered, their cause lost, and their own lives ending with a rattle of drums from redcoated drummer boys, and a broken neck at the end of a British noose.

They signed it anyway.

They stated their principles, they rolled the iron dice, and they gave us our country.

God bless America.

Lord, please make us worthy of them.