A Mother Who Never Was
DAVID C. writes: This article about a woman in an intentionally childless marriage who dedicates herself to extreme promiscuity is a sad sort of remembrance for those women who do not get to be mothers on Mother's Day.
DAVID C. writes: This article about a woman in an intentionally childless marriage who dedicates herself to extreme promiscuity is a sad sort of remembrance for those women who do not get to be mothers on Mother's Day.
HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to all mothers. May you realize the importance of your role. A few thoughts on the cultural institution of motherhood can be found here.
ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:
Sarah Maslin Nir reports in The New York Times on “The Price of Nice Nails:”
On a morning last May, Jing Ren, a 20-year-old who had recently arrived from China, stood among them for the first time, headed to a job at a salon in a Long Island strip mall. Her hair neat and glasses perpetually askew, she clutched her lunch and a packet of nail tools that manicurists must bring from job to job.
Tucked in her pocket was $100 in carefully folded bills for another expense: the fee the salon owner charges each new employee for her job. The deal was the same as it is for beginning manicurists in almost any salon in the New York area. She would work for no wages, subsisting on meager tips, until her boss decided she was skillful enough to merit a wage.
It would take nearly three months before her boss paid her. Thirty dollars a day. (more…)
SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes:
Our reliance on hand-held technology has provided the Pizza-Industrial Complex with ever-greater means of insinuating itself into our lives. It is reaching a point where even our physical safety depends upon the availability of deliverable pizza.
DAWN Stefanowicz, writing at Public Discourse, predicts what is in store in America if the Supreme Court rules in favor of "gay marriage."

WHO was it that said, “What God has torn asunder, no man can put together?” It’s true in the case of Lutheranism and the Catholic Church. The idea of these natural antagonists jointly commemorating the “Reformation” is obscene, an affront to those martyred in this conflict; it’s as absurd as Bolsheviks and monarchists jointly commemorating the Russian Revolution. The basic inference is that truth doesn’t exist.
Here are words from an actual pope on this important issue: (more…)
PETE F. writes regarding the case of Maj. General Michael A. Keltz:
Incidents of this kind are nothing new; they have been happening since the 1990s and the first term of the Clinton administration. Remember the 1991 “Tailhook” scandal in Las Vegas?
The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps lost a number of very proficient and combat-tested aviators in that debacle, and as the Keltz incident proves, not much has changed in the nearly quarter-century which has elapsed since that time. The commissars of political-correctness – cultural Marxists all – still retain their stranglehold upon the military.

A BRITISH High Court judge, who so fits the part of the cruel feminist tyrant in this photo that it seems a caricature, has ruled in the case of a surrogacy deal that broke down:
The decision that the [one-year-old] girl should live with the gay couple was the culmination of a long court battle.
The judge said the girl was born in January 2014 as a result of a surrogacy arrangement in which the mother agreed to bear the child. The gay couple would be the main parents, while the mother – who first met the father when they were both teenagers in Romania – would live with them to share parenting.
The judge rejected the mother’s claim that the child – conceived after an insemination process at the gay couple’s home – was always going to be brought up by her, with secondary involvement from the father. (more…)
WHILE presiding over a disciplinary hearing, Maj. Gen. Michael A. Keltz, a decorated combat pilot, described the appearance of an accused officer in a photo as “drunker than 10,000 Indians.”
“The audience, which apparently included members of Native American descent, was taken aback,” [Tony] Carr wrote in [his] blog. ”Keltz reportedly continued the commentary a little longer, at one point saying the officer looked ‘drunker than 10,000 sailors.’”
He could have said “drunker than 10,000 Irish,” and his 34-year-career might not have ended so soon. (more…)
KARL D. writes:
A tiny woman who is a Captain and veterinarian in the Army took it upon herself to earn a badge which required that she hike 12 miles in full kit in under three hours. In the video you can see a male soldier walking calmly across the finish line while she collapses twice behind him and has a virtual cheerleading team pushing her to finish as she uses her weapon to push herself up. Ostensibly, after passing the finish line one is supposed to be ready to perform the job, something she was unable to do.
While everyone in the media and comments section is cheering her with the obligatory “You go girl” comments, all I feel is sad for her — and sad for the army. (more…)
THE COMMENTER “N.W.” wrote the following in a post from December, 2009:
I believe part of the problem in coming to terms with [modern society] is the common tendency to skip over the concrete particulars and instead firmly ground oneself in the cloudy abstracts. I may be tilting at windmills, granted, but nonetheless I shall begin my campaign against that stalwart bastion of the Enlightenment “the imperative to love all of humanity.” Now, this is a tall and dark fortress with innumerable passages, corridors and gates from which sally forth many a foolish knave, crying their challenge, “Halt foe, dost not thou love all and equally so?” to which I reply with a quixotic “How? How are we to love all of humanity?” (more…)
PRINCESS Charlotte is only a few days old and already the Pizza Industrial Complex is using her to tighten its grip on the British people. Pizza huts at selected locations across Great Britain are offering free slices to those who can prove they are named Charlotte.
DESPITE its high unemployment rate, Baltimore is a federal "preferred refugee resettlement site" and has taken in thousands of refugees from Africa, the Middle East and Asia in the last ten years, as Ann Corcoran reports at Refugee Resettlement Watch. She writes: Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service is one of the Top Nine refugee resettlement contractors in the country and it is headquartered in one of Baltimore’s better neighborhoods. This is what we said in 2014: Gotta keep up their real estate holdings! The Lutheran Center (LIRS headquarters) is a six-story structure constructed in 1999 on property owned by Baltimore’s historic Christ Lutheran Church. The building is located near Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in the historic Federal Hill neighborhood, a charming area rich with history and an eclectic array of eateries and shopping venues. [....] Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fell for the feds ‘progressive’ scheme here in 2012 when she said that bringing more refugees and immigrants to the city would boost the economy completely failing to understand that, just because African Americans are black, they wouldn’t simply ‘welcome’ the rainbow colors of the world to compete with them for jobs, housing and scarce social services. During last week's riots, there were reports that looters had targeted businesses owned by Asians and Arabs.
A COMMENTER at Tradition in Action wrote this a while back:
Once I left my cat without any food for some days when I had to leave on an urgent trip. When I came back it was gone. Months later, I saw it at a house many blocks away dozing on a high stone wall out of my reach. I called its name; after I insisted two or three times it lazily opened an eye and raised its head to see who was calling. It fixed me with a ‘poker face’ for a while, then returned to its sun bath without even recognizing me. I had spent alot of money on that cat and fed it well, except for that week. No love in the picture, only the instinct of self-interest. That’s what’s normal. No one should expect more from cats.
Also the way to train a dog is based on the same instinct. The instructor uses the stimulus-response sequence to achieve his goal, rewarding the dog for good behavior or punishing it for bad. Go watch a training session for police dogs as I did, and you will understand what I mean, the dog reacts from its own interest, nothing else. There’s no love or noble sentiments in the picture, just basic instinct.
CALIFORNIA legislators have proposed that a statue of Father Junipero Serra, the great 18th-century Franciscan missionary, in the National Hall of Statuary in the U.S. Capitol building be removed and replaced with one of the lesbian astronaut Sally Ride. Father Serra, who established eight missions along the California coast that succeeded in converting thousands of Indians, was famous for his devotion to the Indians, his efforts to educate them in agricultural techniques and his objections to harsh treatment of the natives by the Spanish colonizers. He has, however, come under harsh criticism, accused of being an accomplice to colonial brutality. Father Serra is under attack from the world and, as Thomas Droleskey writes, has been misrepresented by "Pope" Francis, who plans to canonize the saint in the fall.
BUCK writes:
Yesterday, Rick Santorum was quoted as saying about Bruce Jenner: “If he says he’s a woman, then he’s a woman,” and that “My responsibility as a human being is to love and accept everybody. Not to criticize people for who they are. I can criticize, and I do, for what people do, for their behavior. But as far as for who they are, you have to respect everybody.”
How stupid is Rick Santorum? “He’s a woman?” “You have to respect…who they are?” (more…)
From prayers and hymns to Mary, the Queen of all hearts: O Queen of Heaven! obtain for me Thy glory there one day to see. Oh then and there, on that bright day, To me thy womb's chaste Fruit display. Here is a reflection on "Mary's First Graces:" Mary began her journey along the road to perfection at a height to which other saints only arrive at the end of a long life of saintliness. God loved her more at the first moment of her existence than He loved the holiest among the rest of men at the time that their earthly pilgrimage was over and they were ripe for their heavenly reward. What glory must have been hers even from the beginning! If we look at Mary through the eyes of feminism, however, we see a woman who did nothing with her life. The greatest woman who ever lived, this paragon of contemplation, the woman who is more loved and honored and revered and cherished than any other woman in history, did nothing important. Only by contradicting their essential principles can feminists uphold Mary, usually as a symbol of girl power.
THERE are many, many, many signs — first and foremost the very obvious fact of clashing dogma — that the religion upheld by the supposed Catholic Church hierarchy and promoted in once Catholic buildings is not the true Catholic religion. One of those signs is the child sex abuse holocaust, the horror of which continues to unfold. This week, a judge in Philadelphia ordered Monsignor William Lynn to return to prison to continue serving a three- to six-year sentence for child endangerment after his conviction was upheld by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Led off to prison in handcuffs, Lynn, 64, was a former Secretary of Clergy in Philadelphia who transferred presbyters suspected of child sexual abuse to other parishes. Lynn was accused of covering up sex crimes for years. He is one of two dozen Vatican II bishops accused of child endangerment or other criminal behavior related to child sexual abuse.
In 2002, Patrick Buchanan wrote:
At the opening of Vatican II, reformers were all the rage. They were going to lead us out of our Catholic ghettos by altering the liturgy, rewriting the Bible and missals, abandoning the old traditions, making us more ecumenical, and engaging the world. And their legacy?
Four decades of devastation wrought upon the church, and the final disgrace of a hierarchy that lacked the moral courage of the Boy Scouts to keep the perverts out of the seminaries, and throw them out of the rectories and schools of Holy Mother Church.
There have always been sinners in the Church and always will be. But this is different. This is the legacy of the Revolution.