THIS RECIPE is from Roy Finamore’s excellent book One Potato, Two Potato. The cake is unconventional because the batter includes potato, which makes it moist and earthy. It is best if made a day ahead of time. For Fourth of July, you can make this a flag cake in a 9×13 sheet pan and top it with vanilla or boiled icing. Make red stripes with food coloring applied to a small amount of icing and use blueberries for stars. My mother always made a flag cake on July Fourth. 

When my husband was a child he misheard the name of the holiday. He thought July Fourth was “July Force.” That makes sense in a way. The day has all the force of July.

Farmhouse Chocolate Cake
Makes one 10-inch tube cake

3/4 pound all-purpose potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
Coarse salt
Cocoa powder for dusting
5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 tablespoons honey (more…)

THE Rev. James Jackson writes:

With the beautiful paintings you’ve been posting lately, I thought you might enjoy this poem.
 
TO AN OAK TREE

           — E.C. Wells

Three hundred changing summers, winters too,
Since first the quivering sapling struggled through,
A hundred thousand days since you were born,
And took to earth from out the green acorn.
Survived the pounding hoof and rooting pig,
Put out first fragile arms, and then the big. (more…)

AN ANONYMOUS reader wrote this to Washington Post columnist Carolyn Hax:

I hope this doesn’t sound too pathetic. My wife asked me what I wanted for Father’s Day this year; I said, “sex.” I figured it would be free and not too much trouble. (more…)

EMILY HALL writes:

A very good friend of mine recently introduced me to your blog. Since then I haven’t gone a single day without perusing your archives. I am writing for two reasons. The first is to provide you with a link to my blog in which I have mentioned you. The second reason requires a much lengthier discussion.

I’d like to thank you for helping me solve an issue I was wrestling with. (more…)

JOHN E. writes:

There is in the statement of Christine Lagarde’s that you quoted, a refusal to accept the world as it is, and a shaking of the fist at God’s creation, albeit in a “personally charming and likable” way. (more…)

CHRISTINE LAGARDE, the French finance minister just appointed to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the International Monetary Fund, told journalist Christiane Amanpour last October, in a remark typical of the Feminine Superiority Complex, that women are more suited to major financial deal-making because they “inject less libido and less testosterone into the equation. … It helps in the sense that we don’t necessarily project our egos into cutting a deal.”

But, wait, isn’t the claim that she has no ego egotistical? NPR reports further on Lagarde, who is the first chief executive goddess in the post and who thus will bring a startlingly new perspective to global finance, a perspective that has nothing to do with self-interest:

Edwin Truman, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, has met Lagarde on several occasions. He says her style is both politically forceful but personally charming and likable.

“She is an aggressive spokesperson for the advancement of women in everything,” he says. “And indeed the truth of the matter is [that] in the economic and financial area, women are for a variety of reasons underrepresented.”

How does one promote the advancement of women in everything? Better yet, how does one do it without showing rank favoritism? And when would the advancement of women in everything achieve its goal?

Something tells me this everything does not include the realm of housewifery. I may be wrong; it’s just a hunch. Let me propose an end point for this project. The campaign for Worldwide Female Advancement must not end until every woman is head of the International Monetary Fund. That’s a fair and modest goal.

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WRITING AT VFR, Sage McLaughlin responds to a commenter who says that blacks were better off under slavery than they are in communities that are violent and chaotic. McLaughlin writes:

American blacks after Reconstruction and before the civil rights era made fantastic progress in terms of education, productivity, and overall well-being. (more…)

WRITING for the Supreme Court majority that struck down a California law banning the sale of violent video games to children yesterday, Justice Antonin Scalia equated electronic games that enable a player to kill, maim, dismember or sexually assault an image of a human being with Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Exhibiting what appears to be a stunning obliviousness to the power of the image over the written word, as well as an unfamiliarity with both video games and fairy tales, Scalia included “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel” among the stories he likened to electronic games that depict human beings blown up, raped or torn apart.

The First Amendment rights of the video game industry, which takes in more than $10 billion annually, have been affirmed. Common sense, backed by studies that show that violent video games increase aggression, has been discarded once again in favor of abstract individual rights. Freedom of expression is held more sacred than the right of the community to protect the young. (more…)

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes about a Philadelphia journalist’s reaction to the flash mob that injured her friends. Unable to address the glaring racial aspect of the attack, the woman is left with platitudes. Auster makes the wry observation:

She wants to crochet [a gift for her hospitalized friend] because as a liberal writer living in liberal society she has nothing to say as a writer, because any true and real statements she might make about the things happening in her world are forbidden.

This is what liberals are reduced to when their liberal world starts to crumble: the F word and crocheting. (more…)

HERE’S a worthwhile piece by W. James Antle, III in The American Spectator about same-sex “marriage” in New York. I strongly disagree with his statement that “the momentum is decidedly in favor of New York-style matrimony,” but he makes the important point, stated many times before but never enough, that modern divorce paved the way for homosexual “marriage” and that there are grave implications for all families as the bond between children and their biological parents is trivialized by same-sex unions. When law does not enshrine the role of the biological parent, there is ample room for family courts to step in and define what a parent is. Antle writes: (more…)

JAMES P. writes:

One might imagine that nursing mothers have no business in law enforcement, but no, according to The Washington Examiner, there are enough of them that the Washington D.C. police department has a “Lactation Accomodation Policy.” The officers were until recently permitted to do office work during their months nursing, but now they have been ordered by Chief Cathy Lanier to return to the streets to actually do their job. They are, however, offered the use of specially installed “lactation rooms.” (more…)

WILL New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, pictured here at yesterday’s Gay Pride parade in New York, be allowed to continue to participate in the sacred rites of Catholicism? He is divorced. He lives with his girlfriend. And, now he has signed into law one of the most anti-Catholic, anti-child, anti-life measures in the history of America, the bill to legalize same-sex “marriage.” As the Church struggles with its administrative mishandling of pedophilia cases, a politician who attends Mass and has the effrontery to call himself Catholic makes it easier for homosexual men to adopt and raise young boys. The issue of whether Mr. Cuomo should receive Holy Communion was a matter of considerable debate several months ago. Now his status is much more serious. The New York governor should be excommunicated forthwith and denied the sacraments and a Catholic burial. If Cuomo does not qualify for the forfeiture of his spiritual privileges, who does?

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EASTERN CHRISTIAN writes:

This is in response to something you stated in the thread “Does Race Have Meaning?” Your line is,

The absolute truths of Christianity need to be guarded by the white European-descended people because only they possess a strong penchant for absolute truths, as Robert B. argues. In order to flourish in other parts of the world, Christianity must be defended at home.

I would like to know how you came to this preposterous notion that only Western people have a penchant for absolute truth. Do you realise what a dangerous belief that is to hold? That is tantamount to saying God built the Caucasians to be more genetically capable of realizing the truth.

It completely invalidates the gospel dictum of ‘Go forth and spread my message to all nations.” Without the tiny Eastern community that spread the gospel, the West would never have heard of it. The West became powerful precisely because they accepted Christianity while most of the Eastern world didn’t. At least not as a foundational pillar of their country. While I completely agree that the current worldview of justice, equality and excellence in science is a remnant of Judeo-Christian morality and heritage, to suggest that race will have anything to do with truth in perpetuity is wrong.

Let us suppose nevertheless Westerners do have a penchant for absolute truth genetically or somehow otherwise.Why is it then today they leave the true religion in large numbers? This is the case in Europe and North America. Isn’t Christianity the absolute truth for them anymore? The truth is, it isn’t. In fact, the irony is this decline in Christian numbers has been negated only by a large number of Hispanic and immigrant communities accepting Christianity and not Caucasians, many of whom are cantering towards the perils of atheism.

I visit your site thinking Christianity is the pulpit from which you espouse your conservatism. Rather increasingly these days I find it centered on race. I hope you post this and give a response. (more…)

ROHAN SWEE writes:

I’m afraid that Robert B., whom you quoted in this post on race, is correct and that Mrs. Johnson, who argued there is no such thing as “the white race,” is indulging in “presentism” – that is, imposing current notions onto the past. The popular denial of “white identity,” or the assertion that “‘whiteness’ is an artificial or arbitrary construct” is a particularly wrong-headed example of this phenomenon, as will be clear to anybody who has bothered to read the dead in their own words on the subject. (more…)

GERRY T. NEAL writes:

In the interesting thread on the subject of “Does Race Have Meaning?,” the commenter Georgia made the remark, “Humans are tribal, not racial.” If by this she means that human beings primarily identify with the smaller groups like tribes and nations than with the larger groups we call races today, she is correct. (more…)

SEBASTIAN C. writes:

There was a Simpson’s episode that featured Lisa, the idealistic daughter, creating an imaginary world named “Equalia,” where everyone was equal except for her and her friend (the place needed some rulers, after all.) Here we have a nursery school in Sweden named “Egalia” where children are trained to be philosophically homosexual. The teachers do not use the standard pronouns of “him” and “her” and refrain from calling the children “boys” and “girls.”  (more…)

DIANA writes:

On 79th Street in New York City today, I saw a cute little blond boy of about three wearing what I thought was a Superman cape. Not so. It was a nylon “rainbow flag” pinned to his small shoulders. He was with two 50ish white men, I guess his “dads.” I immediately thought of the Soviet Union, with its hordes of brainwashed kids. It lasted a fairly long time in the lives of men, but it ended. And so will this.

Today, two days after same-sex “marriage was signed into law in New York, the annual “gay pride” parade took place. (more…)