IF THIS 2012 post by the reader Alan doesn’t make you mothers shed a few tears on this winter day then you are colder than a glacier.

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TWO YEARS AGO, on the occasion of Pentagon approval of women in combat roles, a writer at Family Security Matters wrote about the “elephant in the room:”

Oh, by the way – you and your girlfriends do plan on registering for the draft on your eighteenth birthday, don’t you – just as your male peers do? If you insist upon the privileges associated with military service, you have to assume the risks, too. So, get yourself down to the post office and register – and be quick about it. Up to now, you and your feminist pals have been skimming the cream off the top – demanding the best billets for yourselves (fighter pilot, submariner, etc.) but often bailing out when an inconvenient deployment or a war came along. Pregnancy and “female issues” certainly make handy excuses, don’t they? Well, that won’t fly anymore. Don’t feel like deploying or going to war? Too bad; you’ll go anyway – just like the men do when they are called up. Welcome to the war, baby! (more…)

PETE F. writes:

Regarding your feature, “Girl Soldier,” on women in the U.S. Army Ranger program – where does one begin? Not so many years ago, such a tragicomic effort as trying to make Army Rangers out of women would have been the stuff of satire, but present-day reality has grown so strange that effective satire is now rather a difficult undertaking.

When I was a boy back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the suggestion that women belonged in the infantry – let alone an elite unit like the Ranger regiment – would have been seen as something so ludicrous that only a child (or a comic fishing for laughs) could suggest it. Today, that world has been turned upside down and those who believe that women do not belong everywhere in the military are the ones seen as lunatics. As a society, we have well-and-truly stepped through the looking glass.

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SVEN writes: If you've ever had the pleasure of going to the Washington or Oregon coasts (equally enjoyable in the winter or the summer, in my opinion), you will certainly be awed by the giant Sitka spruce that grow right up to the edge of the beaches. The fierce Pacific storms that assail the coast during the winter throw sea spray into the forest, making the soil somewhat saline. The Sitka spruce has a single branch where it sends all salt so that the rest of the tree can flourish. It reminds me of how there were once specific areas of the country, like San Francisco, where outrageousness was tolerated. Saint Aquinas said of prostitution "Accordingly in human government also, those who are in authority rightly tolerate certain evils, lest certain goods be lost, or certain evils be incurred: thus Augustine says [De ordine 2.4]: If you do away with harlots, the world will be convulsed with lust.'" Small enclaves of sin are no doubt necessary for running large civilizations. But we have allowed these sacrificial branches to take over the whole tree.

FROM E. Everett Bartlett:

SAVE, a national organization working to end sexual assault, is criticizing the recently released movie The Hunting Ground for presenting false statistics, offering a one-side portrayal of the problem, and failing to call for greater police involvement in campus sex cases.

Produced by CNN Films, The Hunting Ground purports to be a documentary. In fact, the movie contains numerous factual errors and omits essential perspectives.  The film does not attempt to verify the accuracy or completeness of persons’ accounts.

The film makes the claim that 20% of college women are sexually assaulted, even though the U.S. Department of Justice reports a woman’s risk is under one percent each year. (more…)

STILL working on small problems with this new format. Things should be in order soon.

FROM A COLLEGE professor writing in response to this piece about trashing college books by Thomas F. Bertonneau: I have had the privilege, so to speak, to observe the self-destruction of the humanities from the inside. The main characteristic of the products of modern graduate schools of the humanities is that they know exactly what they are supposed to say and how to say it as pretentiously and awkwardly as possible.

THE INSANITY of placing women in combat is once again illustrated by this recent photo of soldiers in the Army Ranger’s training course, including this woman, who appears quite petite and as if she is just barely holding herself up. Twenty-six women tried out. Five passed.

In any normal age, this would be considered female oppression. In ours, it’s emancipation. (more…)

THE Prayer of St. Xavier, sung here, describes the love of God at its highest:

O Deus, ego amo te,
O God I love Thee for Thyself
Nec amo te ut salves me,
and not that I may heaven gain
Nec quod qui te non diligent,
nor yet that they who love Thee not
Æterno igne pereunt.
must suffer hell’s eternal pain.
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NOTE: On some operating systems, such as Androids and iPads, this new format is appearing without the full margins. We are working on the problem. In the meantime, you might try viewing it on another computer if you are having difficulties.

FROM a report on the displacement of Americans by foreign high tech workers in Sacramento: "Hiring younger H-1Bs instead of older Americans means you save money," [Computer Science Professor Norm Matloff] said. "It doesn't matter whether an H-1B takes the job here that you would have taken or, on the other hand, if the job is sent overseas. Either way, you as an American programmer or engineer, [don't] have that job," Matloff said, comparing the visas to the controversial practice of outsourcing American jobs to other countries. "It's not any different than what illegal aliens have done to construction workers," said Kim Berry, the webmaster of two sites that almost exclusively address the influx of foreign workers in the U.S. IT job market. "Why hire an American to do the roofing when you can have a truckload of illegals do it for $30 per day each?"

SOPHIA writes:

In a way I’m sorry to share this with you! I got it through about 50 seconds of this video with the volume down very low. There appears to be some feminist organization called “FCKH8” that got little girls dressed as princesses to cuss repeatedly while lamenting inequality. I’m really without words to describe how disgusting it is. Perhaps you already heard about it, but here it is. (more…)

DON VINCENZO writes:

After a long life, the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh died on Feb. 26; he was 97. From 1952 through 1987, Fr. Hesburgh, a member of the Congregation of the Sacred Cross, served as President of Notre Dame University, whose football heroics once garnered the name “the Fighting Irish,” although the number of Hibernian Americans on the team was small and increasingly smaller with each year. After leaving as head of the university, he still exercised a great influence not only on Notre Dame, but on the path other Catholic universities and colleges would follow.  In short, although he would probably object to the title, Fr. Hesburgh became something of an icon to many in the Church. Whether or not that sobriquet is deserved I cannot say, but what can be said beyond cavil was that in seeking to change Notre Dame, he reflects the post Vatican II clerical mindset: the Church must be brought up to date; the Church and its institutions of higher learning must be modernized.

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NOTE: On some computers, this new format is appearing without the full margins. We are working on the problem. In the meantime, you might try viewing it on another computer if you are having difficulties.

Computer programmers are geniuses. They have minds with lots of secret passageways. You open up a door and all this code comes tumbling out, like gold coins and jewels stored away in a castle. I don't get it how they navigate between everyday existence and all that code, but I attribute it to their genius. Thanks to a generous and extremely smart reader who is a web designer, there is a new look at The Thinking Housewife. I am very grateful to the reader who has worked on this site for his time and expertise. There are still a few tweaks that need to be made. I ask for your patience as we get it going. I think you will find this new theme and the Merriweather font much easier on the eye.  

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Regarding “Books in the Trash,” in the 1990s when I taught and did other things in Michigan, I knew many senior faculty members who, coming to their retirement and considering a move to smaller quarters, wanted to sell off the books that they had acquired over a lifetime of scholarship.  In those days it was still possible to invite one of the second-hand book dealers in East Lansing, Ann Arbor or Kalamazoo to take a library off its owner’s hands for a fair price.  When my wife and I left Michigan to come to Upstate New York in 2001, I was able to sell a cumulus of several hundred “academic titles” to a dealer in East Lansing who fully expected to resell them swiftly to humanities graduate students at Michigan State.

More recently, however, this situation appears to have changed.  In various journals dedicated to teaching in the humanities – and on various websites with the same focus – anecdotes have appeared about how very nearly impossible it is to get rid of books.  The second-hand dealers have become extremely selective even as they have diminished in numbers.  It might have been in Academic Questions that I read the sad story of a retiring English professor who, unable even to donate his library, ended up consigning much of it to a bonfire simply because in smaller quarters there would be no space for the many volumes.  A colleague of mine who is about to retire after thirty years of teaching college English also can find no one to take his books.  Not even the campus library is interested in them. (more…)

  ASTUTE analysts in many spheres are coming to a conclusion reached here a long time ago: "Pizza is going to rule the world in the next twenty years." Actually, I would say it is much less time than that, and my pizza prophecies have generally proved to be true. Pretty soon, it may even be mandatory that each person report to the government on pizza intake and prove consumption of at least 6,000 slices a year, which is just about the national average. The Pizza Complex has, as we all know, already extended its reach into the highest levels of government.