KAREN I. writes:

Today, I saw “death with dignity” being advertised on the website of my small local paper. There was a banner ad at the top of the page and the woman in the ad looked pretty happy, considering. 

When I clicked on the ad, it went to the following website for Compassion and Choices, [the national pro-suicide organization.]

My grandfather went through one of these so-called “dignified deaths.”He was denied food and water in a hospital, which acted under the orders of relatives who “knew” it was what he would have wanted. I could not be there as he was 2,000 miles from me, but I was not spared the details of his suffering, which included being denied food and water. He was “allowed” to suck on a wet rag to ease his suffering when he started begging for water. A dying old man begging for water and sucking on a rag in a hospital bed isn’t my idea of a dignified death. It brings tears to my eyes just thinking of it.

Laura writes:

There are important parallels between the “aid-in-dying movement,” which is mounting every single day and will grow so strong that in a few years many more people will bewilderingly look back and wonder how it all began, and the movement for same-sex “marriage.” Both are in favor of things that were not generally desired by the public when the campaign for their enactment began. The people were not clamoring for help in dying. The people were not clamoring for a redefinition of marriage. These innovations are the work of a determined minority.

Both movements are propelled by the activism and funding of a relatively small number of influential individuals, such as George Soros who funds the euphemistically named “Compassion and Choices,” which is a rebranding of its predecessor, the Hemlock Society. (Wealthy Jews appear to be especially numerous among the “aid-in-dying” movement’s supporters.) Here is a brief piece from The Washington Examiner about Soros’ finding of Compassion and Choices. Wesley Smith of the Center for Bioethics and Culture writes about this obsession of the “relatively few” here. In the case of same-sex “marriage,” well-off, childless homosexuals have contributed substantially to its lawsuits and publicity.

The other factor common to both movements is their appeal to the media and its love of highly emotional, disorienting and divisive stories, which keep readers coming back for more.

The media blitzkrieg is fed not only by the conviction of those in the media that these issues are open for debate, but by the widespread belief by the American public that any and all ideas should be entertained and given equal airing. We live in a society that does not say, “Stop, we should not even be talking about this,” or recognize the authority of anyone who would say such a thing, because it has believed so highly in a false freedom and has worshipped freedom-for-freedom’s-sake for so long.

Freedom, as we see again and again, becomes synonymous with aiding and abetting extreme nihilism. That nihilism is now manifesting itself as an actual love of death — and it is presented in the most sunny and smiley terms. Freedom has become another word for enslavement to those with a hatred for life and for everything good.

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SHE was an Army sergeant. Tragically, despite her military training, her own boyfriend strangled her. In her honor, her family erected two SpongeBob monuments at the Spring Grove cemetery in Cincinnati. Both SpongeBobs were in uniform.

“I thought it was the greatest thing in the cemetery,” Deborah Walker, the soldier’s mother, told a local radio station. “I even told the people there that I think this is the best monument I’ve ever seen. It’s the best headstone in the cemetery and they all agreed. It came out really nice.”

The cemetery of the future is coming into view.

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IN an apparent response to multiple protests that drew tens of thousands of protesters to the streets of Paris and other cities, French President François Hollande recently withdrew the family law reform bill that would have legalized surrogate motherhood and “assisted procreation for lesbian couples.” I had read about this last week, but had put it aside in the hope of finding more information about it. Unsurprisingly, it has been under-reported in the press. Galliawatch reported it on February 4th.

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KARL D. writes:

I learned something today that I wish I hadn’t. “Microaggression” is a new term for anything that a white male does that makes nonwhites, homosexuals or women feel even mildly uncomfortable. It seems to be arbitrary and up to the “victim” as to what constitutes a micro-aggression.

Many universities now have microaggression policies whereby a student can be hauled before university administrators if another student accuses him of a micro-aggression. (more…)

LAST WEEK, Judge Arenda Wright Allen, an Obama appointee to federal district court, struck down Virginia’s constitutional marriage amendment, passed by voters in 2006. She thus cleared the way for homosexual “marriage” in Virginia. Altogether, this was not a surprising development. Indeed, it would have been very surprising if it had turned out otherwise.

Wright Allen, a black woman who was educated at Kutztown University and North Carolina Central University, took just over one week after hearing oral arguments to deliver her 41-page decision. It is not unreasonable to assume that she had made up her mind well in advance.

Wright Allen opened her decision with a strong hint at its conclusion. She quoted from Mildred Loving, in her book Loving All:

“I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government should have no business imposing some person’s religious beliefs over others. I support the freedom to marry for all. That’s what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Loving and her husband, Richard, were the plaintiffs in the landmark 1967 Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia, in which they successfully challenged the state’s law against interracial marriage and effectively ended all regulation of interracial marriage, which the court declared as unconstitutional.

Wright Allen argues that morality changes and the history of interracial marriage, which is no longer considered unacceptable, is proof of this. Most Virginians would probably agree that interracial marriage laws were deeply wrong. The fact that Virginians themselves cannot martial any defense of laws against interracial marriage (to defend these laws is not necessarily to argue that they should still be in effect) makes Wright Allen’s point an especially effective argument.

In reminding Virginians of this history, Wright Allen is saying in so many words, “You were bigots once and thus it is not unreasonable to claim that you are bigots now.”

Wright Allen’s ruling essentially asserts that the citizens of Virginia have no good reason to define marriage as it has always been defined everywhere on earth. The grandiosity and hubris that underlies this claim is nothing short of breathtaking. With two bits of legal training, Wright Allen confidently asserts that the parameters of the most fundamental human relationship in history have been irrational and an expression of animus toward an oppressed minority.

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  APPARENTLY, my posting of a video about the military's development of ready-to-eat pizza for soldiers in the field appeared on my screen, but did not appear on yours. I don't know why. I have removed the entry and will post a link to it when I can.

RITA JANE writes:

People who are advocates of euthanasia ignore something fundamental: those of us who are in pain hear a lot that our lives have no value. I have lost count of how many times people have told me that in my situation (chronic, intractable pain), they’d just kill themselves. Of course, before I got sick, I’d have thought the same thing. We humans are woefully incapable of imagining lives other than our own. And yet, despite my illness, I have a good life. My husband adores me; I’m close to family and friends, and I do interesting and socially productive work within my limitations, even if I’m never going to be fit enough to make a huge impact on society.

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“BREEDERS,” a movie about surrogate motherhood has been released by the Center for Bioethics and Culture. I have not yet watched the movie, which can be rented online for $3.99, but I am certain it is a departure from the extreme shallowness and sentimentality with which the American media addresses this issue. Many countries outlaw surrogacy, even altruistic surrogacy. In America, there are relatively few restrictions and they are at the state level, so they are easy to evade by arranging surrogacy in a friendly state.

Here is a description of the movie:

Surrogacy is fast becoming one of the major issues of the 21st century—celebrities and everyday people are increasingly using surrogates to build their families. But the practice is fraught with complex implications for women, children, and families. What is the impact on the women who serve as surrogates and on the children who are born from surrogacy? In what ways might money complicate things? What about altruistic surrogacy done for a family member or close friend? Is surrogacy a beautiful, loving act or does it simply degrade pregnancy to a service and a baby to a product? Can we find a middle ground? Should we even look for one?

From The Center for Bioethics and Culture, producers of the award-winning Eggsploitation (2010, 2013), and Anonymous Father’s Day (2011), Breeders: A Subclass of Women? explores this important issue, talking with surrogates, physicians, psychologists, and activists across the political and ideological spectrum.

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YESTERDAY, as has been widely reported, Belgium became the first nation in the world to allow euthanasia for terminally ill children of any age. Children, who aren’t typically trusted with decisions on far less weighty matters,, are expected to be fully cognizant of what they are requesting in approved cases. The law is the latest measure advanced by the aggressive right-to-die movement in the formerly Roman Catholic country. Western society is so saturated with a death wish that even little children under expert care with all kinds of pain medications are not exempt. As Wesley Smith of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, remarked, “Treating a child like a sick horse is what passes for ‘compassion’ these days.”  Smith has documented some of the abuses of “euthanasia” in Belgium. He said the child euthanasia bill was unsurprising: “Once killing is accepted as an answer to human difficulty and suffering, the power of sheer logic dictates that there is no bottom.”

The measure has deflected attention from the more pressing issue — and one can’t help but suspect that distraction is intentional. Most often euthanasia does not concern the young. It concerns the old. With this type of decline in the abhorrence toward voluntary death, the old are the ones most likely to feel the pressures to end their lives.

Here is an interview at CNN with a Belgium woman who supported the new law, and it gives a powerful glimpse into the Belgium people, whose problem appears to be not too much suffering but too little:

Mother Linda van Roy, from Schilde, Belgium, [was] among those backing the bill.

She could do nothing to help her terminally ill baby, Ella-Louise, in the last hours of her life.

Ella-Louise, who was 10 months old when she died just over two years ago, would never have qualified for euthanasia.

But her mother had to watch as her baby — who had Krabbe disease, a rare and terminal genetic mutation that damages the nervous system — slowly faded away under palliative sedation, food and liquid withheld so her suffering was not further prolonged. (more…)

CATHY YOUNG in Time magazine, of all places, has a good piece on the accusations of child abuse by Dylan Farrow against Woody Allen. Mr. Allen strikes me as an intensely creepy and sick man. His relationship with the adopted daughter of the mother of his son and his taking of pornographic pictures of her when she was probably still a teenager makes me inclined to believe that he was capable of molesting a girl and likely did molest her — and the now-28-year-old Dylan’s account was compelling. But the truth will never be known and Young’s points about the feminist witch hunt are sound.

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AT World Net Daily, Colin Flaherty looks at the reaction to an online article about black crime. He writes:

Black History Month in Baltimore is a busy, busy time. Every aspect of black life in this city is remembered and celebrated: Black schools. Black music. Black movies. Black churches. Black literature. Black clothing. Black politicians. Even black trains.

Then Tracey Halvorsen had to go and spoil it all: She wrote an article about crime in Baltimore. How she and her mostly white neighbors live in fear. And no one seems to care. Or worse, lots of people think it is normal. “Baltimore City,You Are Breaking My Heart,” is going viral for an on-line magazine called Medium.com. A few quotes: (more…)

MIDDLE class men can’t even dream in many cases of supporting a family without sending their wives to work. But what worries Claudia Goldin, president of the American Economic Association and a professor at Harvard? She is concerned that women lawyers and corporate executives, who clearly work fewer hours and less continuous hours than men, are not making enough money relative to men.

In her recent paper, risibly titled “A Grand Gender Convergence,” Goldin becomes the fourteenth million academic to study pay differentials between men and women. She throws all kinds of figures into the computer, which is the looking glass of future equality. She uses these figures with the assumption that men and women are autonomous units and not interdependent. The fact that many men are supporting women  is not something that seems to cross her mind. Goldin found that women are “converging” with men in that they have equal salaries in most professions until that point in which women start working fewer hours or more “flexible” hours. That’s not right. That’s not right. The business world should not be structured in such a way that it rewards people who are around when their employers need them.

Goldin writes:

“[T]he gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours or worked particular hours. Such change has already occurred in various sectors, but not in enough.”

She disgracefully evades the issue as to how companies are going to accomplish certain tasks when employees are not around with lots of graphs and charts.

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I FORGOT to mention that Olympic athletes are walking advertisements. Here we see a lovely young woman, Alissa Johnson from the women’s ski jumping team, advertising a credit card company. The Olympic message of “you can be whatever you want to be” melds with the message “you can spend as much as you want to spend.”

By the way, isn’t it wonderful that women can now fly 60 miles per hour through the air — and risk falling to the ground in front of large crowds of people, who find nothing wrong with the possibility of watching a young woman injure herself for life? The “agony of exclusion” for women ski jumpers has finally ended. That’s right — agony. It was agony for women to be excluded from ski jumping teams.

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  IN 2012, I wrote about the British Royal Air Force pilot Kirsty Stewart, the first female member of the famous Red Arrows aerobatic team. At that time, Stewart left the Red Arrows because she was allegedly traumatized by the death of two colleagues. What I did not know, and no one knew at that time, was that she was also being questioned about a possible affair with a fellow member of the Red Arrows, which would violate military ethics. Stewart and the male pilot, Ben Murphy, who are both divorced, recently announced they will be marrying, shedding serious doubt on their denials of an earlier affair, according to The Daily Mail. The absurd British and the equally absurd and irresponsible American military have compromised national defense by putting men and women in such close quarters that only the oddball and neutered could resist falling in love. Stewart and Murphy were not in combat, but others like them will be. So military commanders become chaperones and a military cockpit becomes a great place to find a husband or wife.

A human being achieves order in relation to that which is not human. When pondering the world of the Olympic athlete, we see this law in effect. The earliest Olympic athletes in Ancient Greece oriented themselves toward the supernatural. They strove to be like the swift-footed gods. Sacrifices were offered on altars before the start of the athletic games, which took place outside the sacred temple zone. Body and spirit were working toward some kind of balance. They were not at constant war.

The contemporary Olympic athlete, by contrast, defines himself in relation to the machine. His existence is reduced to highly-exacting scientific regimens designed to make both body and mind conform to machine-like regularity and control. He lives for years in an artificial, denatured world of flourescent-lit gyms and fitness machines. He is fed scientifically, like a laboratory animal. He wears not clothes, but freakish synthetic outfits invented by scientists and athletic technocrats. He has no leisure. His mind is bent at all times, as he stands before the control panel of his own body, upon infinitesimal differences in performance. A split second can make all the difference, in the way a split second can make all the difference in the smooth functioning of mechanical gears. Athletics supposedly make him a better person.  But it must take him years after leaving this confining, technocratic sphere in which body and spirit are estranged to conquer the wild frontiers of his own soul.

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PROVING once and for all that the government is fully behind the Pizza-Industrial Complex (and that squandering money is a bureaucratic imperative), the U.S. Department of Agriculture has just released a study on pizza consumption. About one in eight Americans consume pizza on any given day. Whites consume more of it than blacks and Hispanics, which goes a long way toward explaining why 60 percent of white men appear to be nine months pregnant. In short, the nation is hooked on a loathsome industrial concoction of white bread, tomato paste and greasy rubber. The sacred tradition of dinnertime drudgery is virtually unknown in countless homes and has been supplanted by the grease-stained cardboard box.

I believe these figures are far too low. Most people are not honest when it comes to pizza intake. Notice how the “study” did not correlate pizza to any health (or ill health) indicators. Do you think the government wants people to know?

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KARL D. writes:

While I don’t agree all the time with Laura Ingraham, she is one of the best attack dogs out there in TV land. I caught her this past Sunday morning on FOX news battling on immigration. Essentially, she was on her own against the entire panel. A panel that consisted of one liberal and two so-called conservatives. One of which was the loathsome George Will. I was jumping up and down in front of the screen as she virtually destroyed them with her arguments. The only thing lacking in her position was the huge elephant in the room, which is the destruction of America both culturally and demographically. She merely skirted around it with the dropping of the tired old assimilation word, and only as an after thought. Of course that would be too much to hope for and you can only argue so many points in the constrained time frame. Otherwise, it was a great and classic clip in my humble opinion.  (more…)