“The environment should compete with religion as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity,” claims a paper on the United Nations Environmental Program and its need to be at the center of political and economic decisions at the U.N. and around the world. Reported in a Fox News exclusive, the author of the paper, Mark Halle believes:

there are signs that the hugely ambitious role he and his fellow-thinkers sketched for UNEP as religion’s main competitor are “beginning to happen.” Halle pointed to UNEP’s espousal this year of a so-called Green Economy Initiative, a proposal to radically redesign the global economy and transfer trillions of dollars in investment to the world’s poorest developing countries, but one that is couched in terms of providing new green jobs, an end to old, unfair carbon-based energy subsidies, and greater global fairness and opportunity. Halle called the development “quite exciting.”

I’m sure the U.N. will do its best to keep all of that money out of corrupt hands in various African governments, just like they did with the Iraq Oil for Food program.

It was a good Thanksgiving break. In spite of my fears, I got the house (adequately) cleaned, and the turkey (more than adequately) roasted by the time the family showed up. As always we were crowded but cheerful, and everybody seemed to have a good time.

We gathered on Saturday, and by Sunday the cold I’d been flirting with ravished me entire, and I spent the day in bed with it. And a book, which I’ll be reviewing shortly.

The interview with the Christian Authors Show, which I mentioned in an earlier posting, has finally appeared on their schedule. It will be the featured interview on Dec. 9 and 10, and selectable after that. (Unfortunately, I can’t link to the section I’m in. You have to select “The Christian Authors Show” from the menu.)

In case nobody’s mentioned it to you, Christmas is coming. West Oversea is the perfect gift for every person on your list! Even if they don’t read books, the guilt your gift will engender will be salutary for their characters. And it’s the one gift you know they won’t exchange—because we don’t do returns.

In fact, you should buy two copies for everybody. It will make Christmas truly magical.

For me and my publisher, anyway.

There’s an ordering link on the sidebar.

Terry Teachout on artists who have and have not dried up.

You may still be thinking about food this holiday weekend (holiday, btw, comes from an older word, holy day, which in Old English read this way: háligdæg), so let me give you a food story.

Vinegar is good for dissolving hard water deposits. The manufacturer of my coffee maker instructs me to run a full pot of vinegar through the machine to clear it of calcium build-up which wear it down over time. I don’t think our water in North Georgia is very hard, but it’s hard enough to leave a residue behind which you can see after a while. Leaving water sitting in the kettle causes plates of calcium to form on the bottom.

So one time a while back, I filled the kettle half full of vinegar to clean off those plates. Heating the vinegar seems to work well, but I don’t know if it’s necessary for cleaning. After I let the vinegar work on the kettle (I think it was the next day), I made myself a cup of tea. I think I used a bag of herbal tea we had had for too long, and it must have gone bad because it had a strong acrid taste. It was the worst tea I’d ever made.

But you are likely way ahead of where I was at the time, and you already see that I had steep my tea leaves in boiled vinegar, which is why I entitled this post as I did. If you make your tea with vinegar, friends, you will cap off your beverage’s sweetness at the root. There’s probably an old Chinese proverb about that, maybe “Better to be deprived of food for three days than to drink tea steeped in vinegar.”

Or “As tea in vinegar sours the stomach, so does living with a contentious woman.”