NOVUS ORDO WATCH examines the widespread accusation that those who criticize are "haters:" Contemporary man has long replaced reason with emotion. This is why we see such absurd phenomena as transgenderism in our day. It is also the reason why those who defend the natural law and the completely rational idea that there cannot be more than one true religion, are accused of “hate/hatred”, “anger”, “fear/phobia”, “insanity”, or “extremism.” People have simply lost (or never learned) the ability to reason and to reason correctly. They prefer to feel instead. And whatever makes them feel bad, is bad. See additional commentary on what kind of hatred is morally permissible.

IF there is any doubt in your mind that the high incidence of obesity in America is the result of two factors -- the decline of home cooking and the aggressive marketing of processed foods -- then I suggest you read this piece in The New York Times about how multinational food companies have transformed the traditional diets of relatively poor countries like Brazil. Obesity has soared in Brazil and a high percentage of its obese people are malnourished. That's right -- you can be fat and malnourished. Nestle runs a successful program employing women as a door-to-door sales force, much like Avon did with cosmetics. The families of these women, who get discounts for the sugary cereals and yogurts, are among those who now suffer from serious diet-related diseases. [O]f the 800 products that Nestlé says are available through its vendors, Mrs. da Silva says her customers are mostly interested in only about two dozen of them, virtually all sugar-sweetened items like Kit-Kats; Nestlé Greek Red Berry, a 3.5-ounce cup of yogurt with 17 grams of sugar; and Chandelle Pacoca, a peanut-flavored pudding in a container the same size as the yogurt that has 20 grams of sugar — nearly the entire World Health Organization’s recommended daily limit. Until recently, Nestlé sponsored a river barge that delivered tens of thousands of cartons of milk powder, yogurt, chocolate pudding, cookies and candy to isolated communities in the Amazon basin. Since the barge was taken out…

IN 1835, at the age of 27, Edgar Allan Poe, who was orphaned as a toddler, married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. The author was devoted to her. Seven years later, she became seriously ill with tuberculosis, and was ill for five more years before her death in 1847.

Poe, a heavy drinker, never found lasting love after his wife’s death but had many romantic friendships with women.

Barbara Wells Sarudy at It’s About Time tells the story of Poe’s love life with portrait paintings. (more…)

LIFE has been overwhelming the last few days. So I haven't blogged for good reason. Our 28-year-old older son got engaged to be married on Saturday. We knew of his proposal -- and probable acceptance -- in advance and had planned a big party for about 60 guests. On Friday night, while we were running around preparing for the party, I got on a step stool to get some light bulbs stored high up on top of a cabinet. Something went wrong -- not quite sure -- and I flew off the stool and landed on the floor on my left wrist, which broke. After a couple of hours in the emergency room and no sleep due to pain, I returned to party preparations on Saturday, with help. Somehow it all came off. It was a happy event with eating, drinking, gabbing, singing to the piano and children running around in the dark playing hide-and-seek. Things would have been better if I had two hands to use and wasn't feeling lousy, but many guests offered help and my sister washed a lot of dishes. We only wished my parents could have been there. They are both ailing and my mother is in the hospital. We are very fond of our future daughter-in-law, who is beautiful, both inside and out; I think it was okay to have broken a limb on her behalf. A word of advice: Do not get on stools or…

ALMOST all of us at some point believe — or act as if we believe — that we can hide from God. It’s as if we think or assume that God has other things to do than be with us. Seven billion people, and many more in production — God couldn’t have time to focus on everyone. We assume God’s indifference or distraction. He doesn’t really see us. He doesn’t really know what we just thought or said. We look at the throngs on city streets, the seas of traffic, the soaring population statistics and we think, “He couldn’t care about us all. What an absurd idea.”

When we go about ordinary life as if God were not aware of every single thing we do, we are hiding from God — but out in the open. Did you ever play hide-and-seek with a little child who thought that he could not be seen when he closed his eyes? Hiding from God is sort of like that. We think that because we are oblivious or blind to God’s presence, He cannot see us.

But He can. God is everywhere, closer to each one of us than anyone else. He is within us and without. He is not constrained by time or number or space. His attention span is infinite. Add a few more billion of his creatures, he would fit each one in. He knows everything: our thoughts, our actions, our intentions, our successes, our failures. There is nowhere in the world where we can go and hide from Him. He is the most benevolent and loving of spies. He is our Father.

So much of what Jesus said makes no sense unless He is with us, each one of us, constantly. For instance when he said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven,” who knows whether someone is poor in spirit if not Jesus Himself?

When a person goes about as if God were not aware of every single thing he does — and we have all done it — he is trying to hide from God. He is attempting the impossible.

We cannot hide from Him, and once we realize this truth, and truly take it in, we have uncovered one of the greatest secrets of existence and the foundation of a happy (in the non-sentimental sense of the word) life. Come out in the open. You are known.

You are known by Someone with high expectations.

I was recently hiking in the New Hampshire mountains with my husband when we came to a waterfall, a plunging precipice situated above two smaller falls. A little girl of about eight years old had somehow jumped across the rocks in the pool below the first waterfall and ended up stranded on the other side, too frightened to go back. She was part of a large Orthodox Jewish family and everyone was caught up in rescuing her (except the mother, who walked away nearly in tears and said, “I can’t watch this” and a few of her older brothers who took advantage of the emergency to play unsupervised.)

The father was confidently and calmly leading the rescue. He went over to the other side and was showing the girl how to step back over the pool via the rocks. All the time, the father had a baby boy of about eight months strapped to his back. The baby was back-to-back with his father. He was facing outward, looking up at the sky and trees. As the water was roaring around them and the father was coaxing his daughter over the wet rocks, the baby’s lids grew heavy. He had been chewing on something, but the movements of his jaws slowed. As the father stepped over the rocks, inches away from possible disaster, and held out his hands for his daughter to jump toward him, the baby opened his mouth one more time — and then fell asleep. He just conked out. It was as if he were a tired commuter on a train at the end of a long day. He was oblivious to danger on the slippery rocks or in the deep water below. It would have been comical if the situation had not been so alarming.

That’s how we should be — like the sleeping baby, who knew his father was there even though he could not see him. We can no more hide from God than a baby can hide from his loving parents. God sees us. He knows us. He watches us. We should strive to be aware of His presence as a baby who relies on his parents for everything is aware of their presence. We should pause frequently — and notice Him, converse with Him, admire Him.

And we should know that it is precisely because of His presence that all danger is ultimately not true danger if we trust in Him, just as all was well for that little girl, who finally walked through the pool (instead of on the rocks), and for her brother, who slept while dangling over rushing water.

There is only one true danger on the slippery precipices that we encounter in life  — and that is forgetting the presence of the Father who loves us, who sees us every single moment of the day and from whom we can never hide. (more…)

ALAN writes:

“When I was seventeen, it was a very good year,” Frank Sinatra sang in the best song in his classic 1965 album “September of My Years.”

It dawned on me one day recently while sorting through old papers and letters that fifty years have now gone by since I acquired those things.

When I was seventeen, in 1967, it was indeed a very good year in some ways. Merely to be young and alive was cause for celebration. I was a spoiled brat but didn’t know it. It was hard to tell because there were millions of others like me. I found I was part of a species unknown in world history until Americans invented it only a few decades earlier: The Teenager. I lived in a limbo state between childhood and adulthood. I hated it.

The older generation did not see it quite that way: They looked upon the younger generation as beneficiaries of the highest material standards of living in history.  That judgment was valid, but it was only half the picture. The other half was the moral-philosophical framework whose transmission to the younger generation is the perennial responsibility of the elder, but at which (to put it charitably) the elder generation in the 1950s-‘60s did not excel.

I had no awareness of such things in 1967, or that a cultural revolution was going on. Current events were too vivid and I was too young to be able to evaluate them properly.

So as I look back fifty years, what do I see?  Is life today better than it was in 1967? How could anyone doubt it?  Americans today have bigger TV screens and bigger, faster, and louder motor vehicles. Isn’t that proof? (more…)

CONDUCTOR Matthew Halls was fired from the Oregon Bach Festival when he amiably joked with a black singer in a Southern accent.

Desire to Return writes:

The woman who created this bizarre situation probably thinks of this as a defining moment of her life, the time she stood up to the evil racists. Reporting Halls to the authorities was, for her, most likely, a means of asserting personal power in an increasingly impersonal society.  Getting Halls canned might have been one of the few times in her life where she felt real efficacy.

Of course, that’s all speculation. She could just as easily be a person who has done this sort of thing repeatedly, a person addicted to the frisson of righteous indignation springing from accusing the guilty and seeing them punished. For all we know, this woman is a decorated veteran in the war to stamp out dangerous jokes. (more…)

A READER sent this reminiscence of the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926:

When my Dad was little, the family moved to Coral Gables one week before the Great Miami Hurricane of 1926.  He had just celebrated his seventh birthday on September 10 on the boat that brought them. George Merrick hired my grandfather, a civil engineer, to oversee the building of the roads and bridges of the first planned city. While in the eye, the landlord asked my grandfather to help him repair the roof.  It wasn’t long before the ladder had blown away and  my poor grandmother thought my grandfather had, too.  She had sheets of water pouring into the house and two kids burning up with scarlet fever.  (more…)

  LET'S HONOR the dead of 9/11 today on the 16th anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks -- not just those who died on that devastating day but the hundreds of thousands who have perished in the resulting carnage. Let's honor them now and in the days ahead by speaking up for three things: 1. The return of our troops home, and a close to the fraudulent War on Terror 2. The end of the National Security State and its massive, unconstitutional security measures since 9/11 3. Criminal charges against the true perpetrators of the attacks on the World Trade Center and their accomplices. Come home, America. Come home to sanity and peace. The war machine is Goliath, we are David. But lies are inherently weak and the truth is strong.   Mike King of The Anti-New York Times summarizes the fruits of 9/11: "1. The War in Afghanistan: - still ongoing! -- 2500 dead Americans, 20,000 injured / Afghanis: 300,000 indirect and direct deaths 2. Iraq War II: 5000 dead Americans, 31,000 injured / Iraqis: 1,000,000 indirect and direct deaths 3. Libya: Libya under Qaddafi was a stable country and an obstacle to migrant invasions into Europe. Now it is ruined, destabilized, and open to Africans making their way to boats, docked at the Libyan shore, destined for Italy / EU. 4. Syria: 100's of 1000's dead, cities in ruins, Women taken hostage and held as sex slaves by "ISIS." President…

THIS IS Lynn Yaeger, one of America’s most influential fashion experts.

Bad is good, false is true and ugly is beautiful in mentally ill America. Below is a photo of Catherine McManus, the Vogue fashion editor in 1950, when Catholic ideals of womanly dignity remained, mostly a superficial level, in American culture. The deeper principles had long since been lost, laying the foundation for the current Age of  Freaks.

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AN INTERESTING POST from The National Weather Service on the 1928 Hurricane, in which 372 people died: By September, 1926, the population of Dade County and the young City of Miami had blossomed to well over 100,000 (more than doubling from the census figure of 42,753 in 1920) and construction was everywhere.  Smaller nearby settlements of Lemon City, Cocoanut Grove, and Little River were absorbed as Miami swelled with new residents; optimistic, speculative, and woefully under-educated about hurricanes.  New buildings were constantly starting on Miami Beach, which had been built across Biscayne Bay on a series of barrier islands, bulldozed from their mangrove beginnings. [...] In those days, storm warnings were centralized in Washington, DC, and disseminated to field offices like Miami.  However, as late as the morning of September 17, less than 24 hours before the category 4 storm's effects would begin in South Florida, no warnings had been issued.  At noon, the Miami Weather Bureau Office was authorized to post storm warnings (one step below hurricane, or winds of 48 to 55 knots).  It was only as the barometer began a precipitous fall, around 11 PM the night of September 17, that Gray hoisted hurricane warnings. The story of what happened over the next 12 hours is best told by those who lived through it at the Weather Bureau Office. Click on the links below to read the official record written by Official-in-Charge Richard Gray of the Miami Weather Bureau Office.…

  FROM a 2008 article by Michael J. Rayes: Once upon a time, Boyfriend and Girlfriend had a lot of fun together. Their time together was filled with mutual activities that were fun for them both. Girlfriend looked up to Boyfriend, and Boyfriend thought Girlfriend was a lot of fun. So they got married and became Husband and Wife. Now, Husband and Wife spend time together bickering about the bills. They don't spend a lot of time with each other, but when they are together, they only talk about what is stressful because they have responsibilities. Husband tells Wife what she isn't doing right. Wife nags Husband about all the things he should be doing. When they want to have fun, they do it with "the guys" or "the gals" or they go off alone for "alone time." Boyfriend and Girlfriend liked each other and then they fell in love. Husband and Wife love each other, but they don't like each other. They didn't fall out of love, but they fell out of like. Men and women form emotional attachments to members of the opposite sex with whom they spend enjoyable time together.[11] In other words, your tennis partner should be your spouse, not someone else. As the Catholic psychologist Rudolph Allers put it,"Marriage is life companionship. Therefore an education for marriage is an education for companionship in general."[12] It is ludicrous to divorce someone you really enjoy being with. No…

I WAS IN a hospital emergency room today with my mother (it’s been a busy week) when a young woman came walking out of the triage room. She was wearing a tank top, slacks and a backpack. She was obviously there for some medical reason.

The arresting thing was, her arms and neck were covered with large, scribbly, black tattoos. It was as if a child had taken a black marker and scribbled all over her or a graffiti “artist” had used her as a canvas. Even in this age of tattoos, it was shocking how disfigured this young woman was. If she was there because of her tattoos, undergoing an emergency tattoo-removal by a concerned physician, that would seem right. But she was apparently there for some involuntary disorder and people were just acting as if it was all perfectly normal.

She reminded me of another woman I saw recently in a very different setting, on a beautiful lake beach in New Hampshire. She was about 20. Her hair was dyed black, she was wearing black-red lipstick and a black tank top. Her body also was covered with black tattoos. One of her arms was entirely blackened. It appeared to be an ink sleeve. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. All in all, she looked like a restless spirit who had risen up from the nether world to haunt children in the sand and rob them of their innocence.

When I returned home from the hospital (my mother is fortunately doing much better), I found a note from this blogger, Desire to Return, recommending his post on woman and tattoos. He writes:

These days, it’s rare to see a young woman in public who doesn’t have some ink on display, or who hasn’t added some metal adornment to her face via an additional hole.

I’m not crazy about tattoos on men either. But, they’re worse on women. Tattoos suggest toughness, pain, grittiness. However bad tattoos look on men they at least emphasize traits that are not at odds with the central nature of the masculine.

Not so with tattoos on women. A woman with a tattoo is declaring herself to be at odds with the essential nature of her own femininity. She has marked herself with a sign that says, “Look at me! I’m hard!”  The decoration on her skin suggests a distortion in her soul. It suggests that she does not see feminine modesty, elegance and reserve as valuable or worth cultivating. (more…)