PHILOSCRIBE writes:

I don’t know if the divorce of Elliot Rodger’s parents played a role in his deranged mental state. But you don’t have to be a psychologist to think it surely didn’t help prevent the abyss into which their son was sinking.

Incredibly, this is the second time that a son of a Hollywood director committed a rampage murder in Santa Barbara near the University of California campus. The second time! The first occurred in 2001 when David Attias plowed his Saab into a crowd, killing four students on the spot and severly injuring a fifth victim. Attias was found guilty on four counts of manslaughter and sentenced to 60 years in the state mental assylum. A judge recently granted his request to be transfered to a less restrictive facility. Here is a link.

One might ask what is driving the sons of Hollywood’s elite to go on killing sprees. I mean, what are the chances?

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  "Dwelling in the loftiest citadel of virtue, like a sea of divine grace or an unfathomable source of love that has everywhere overflowed its banks, she poured forth her bountiful waters on trusting and thirsting souls. Able to preserve both flesh and spirit from death she bestowed health-giving salve on bodies and souls. Has anyone ever come away from her troubled or saddened or ignorant of the heavenly mysteries? Who has not returned to everyday life gladdened and joyful because his request had been granted by the Mother of God? "She is a bride, so gentle and affectionate, and the mother of the only true bridegroom. In her abundant goodness she has channelled the spring of reason’s garden, the well of living and life-giving waters that pour forth in a rushing stream from divine Lebanon and flow down from Mount Zion until they surround the shores of every far-flung nation. With divine assistance she has redirected these waters and made them into streams of peace and pools of grace. Therefore, when the Virgin of virgins was led forth by God and her Son, the King of kings. amid the company of exulting angels and rejoicing archangels, with the heavens ringing with praise, the prophecy of the psalmist was fulfilled, in which he said to the Lord: At your right hand stands the queen, clothed in gold of Ophir (Psalm 45)." From The Queenship of Mary by Saint Amadeus of Lausanne

IF Jorge Bergoglio were a true pope and not a scandalous heretic, what would be the purpose of a visit to Jordan and Israel, such as the one he concluded yesterday? There would be only one purpose: To seek the conversion of both Muslims and Jews so that this blood-drenched region has some hope of peace.

But if the Argentinian Bomber sought to convert, he had a strange way of going about it. For he seemed only to affirm Muslims and Jews in their disastrously erroneous beliefs. He spoke admiringly of “three great monotheistic religions,” as if it were possible for contradictory religions to be true and as if the outrageous denial of Christ and his Sacred Humanity by Jews and Muslims (yes, Muslims do deny Christ) amounted to nothing. He praised the Jews as God’s “people,” as if the Incarnation had never happened and the Covenant with the Hebrews were still alive. And he invited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Shimon Peres both to join him in prayer at the Vatican as if they were all worshipping the same God. How much further can the world sink than this indifferentism, which is so conducive to worldwide atheism and international strife?

Francis blathered on, of course, about religious freedom:

Religious freedom is in fact a fundamental human right and I cannot fail to express my hope that it will be upheld throughout the Middle East and the entire world. The right to religious freedom “includes on the individual and collective levels the freedom to follow one’s conscience in religious matters and, at the same time, freedom of worship… [it also includes] the freedom to choose the religion which one judges to be true and to manifest one’s beliefs in public” (Ecclesia in Medio Oriente, 26). (more…)

KARL D. writes:

While this Elliot Rodgers character who went on a shooting spree in L.A. had numerous psychological issues, his parents’ divorce and then the coming and going of nannies affected him greatly if you read his manifesto.

As a child of divorce myself (an ugly one at that), I found myself nodding in agreement with what he had written about his experience, and how his life was radically changed. My father left when I was ten and I forever looked at my life since then as two different lives and myself having two different personalities: pre- divorce and post-divorce. The divorce was horribly traumatic for me.

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CAROLYN G. writes:

For years, I have ached as I see a trend in fathers neglecting to be fathers and parents giving up on a marriage on a whim, thinking only of themselves.  I see children floundering.  Our family unit is falling apart because adults refuse to grow up.  Then previously joyful holidays and special events become uncomfortable events and “blended” families have trouble blending.  The following story illustrates the latest one in our family:

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FOR years we have been hearing that women are just like men except for a few minor anatomical differences and therefore all (lucrative) occupations that were once male should be opened to women. No sooner is this transformation enacted by government or corporations in some specific arena than it is openly admitted that women are very different from men and the workplace must be transformed to accommodate these differences.

An announcement by a Naval commander typifies this phenomenon. The Navy once decided it must have women sailors because women are just like men. Now the Navy says it can’t retain women sailors because women are not just like men. From the AP:

The Navy retains female sailors at half the rate it holds on to men. One result is that it doesn’t have enough senior enlisted women on some ships stationed overseas, leaders of the Navy say. 
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  KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT explores the busy highways of Ontario.

A BRITISH woman describes her alarm over her 16-year-old daughter’s decision to go through “sex change” treatment. National Health Service clinicians have offered to treat the girl without her parents’ consent.

She has been told to dress and live as a boy for two years — called RLE, or Real-Life Experience — after which she will be given the male hormone testosterone, which will mean she will grow a beard, her incipient curves will be eradicated and she will acquire the body and voice of a man.

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PENNSYLVANIA Gov. Tom Corbett today said he would decline to appeal a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling striking down a state marriage law. With this decision, and a similar ruling last week by a judge in Oregon, an estimated 44 percent of Americans live in states where the absurdity known as “same-sex marriage,” which has no parallels in the history of human civilization prior to a couple of decades ago, is now legal, or soon-to-be legal. An innovation that was unimaginable 50 years ago now encompasses almost half the population.

No amount of legal maneuvering or appeals to the Constitution could have prevented this.

America was founded on principles of individual liberty that assume man is a creature entirely of this world. The U.S. Constitution left this nation incapable of protecting over the long term the values most Americans once held, and even those most Americans still hold. A  social order founded on liberty as the highest good cannot help but devour and destroy the rights of God and lead to social chaos. These judicial decisions will bring enormous and almost unimaginable conflict in their wake. No legal strategy or “conservative” politician will be able to mend those tears in the social fabric.

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  KARL D. writes:  A female senior at the University of Michigan started a taxi service which picks up her fellow college girls the morning after their drunken one night stands or as she calls it, “Post hookup.” She calls her service “The walk of shame” with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Besides driving her clients home she also provides water and the morning-after abortion pill. Lovely isn’t it? These girls' parents must be so proud and feel that the thousands of dollars spent on tuition is well spent. To add insult to injury, she has been awarded for her endeavors a reality show on VH1, a channel that is very popular with the college age demographic. I have said it before and will say it again. End of times.

GRATEFUL READER writes:

Jennifer Lahl, who created the documentaries Breeders, Eggsploitation, and Anonymous Father’s Day, makes many good points in an interview. She discusses the physical and psychological harm done to the children arising from inhuman interactions (monetary transactions and clinical procedures) and to the women who sell their eggs and rent their wombs. (more…)

DAN R. writes:

Matthew Richer at VDARE gets to the bottom of things in this column, with his description of the Robert Copeland incident as the “criminalization of dissent.”  Technically, of course, he’s incorrect in that Copeland will not go to jail, but what difference does that make when the objective of intimidating people into silence can be accomplished through non-violent means, i.e., the new means of “polite totalitarianism” (a coinage of writer Ronn Neff from The Last Ditch)?  As an aside, it’s not even all that interesting–and certainly not surprising–that Mitt Romney, a part-time resident of Wolfeboro, should join in the chorus, though it surely adds to the depressing overall effect.

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A Grateful Reader writes:

You write often about the dangers that modern technologies pose to persons and to their interaction in community–dangers that arise from a turning away from reality, from what is true, good, and beautiful. An article by Russell Hittenger, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, expounds upon Christopher Dawson’s apocalyptic remarks about technology. Dawson did not define modern technology as only what we think of as “labor-saving devices, such as automated implements or pistons, which replace repetitive human acts.” Rather, he writes, “most distinctive of contemporary technology is the replacement of the human act.” And by contemporary technology he refers to medical and psychological as well as engineering advances. For instance, “the contraceptive pill supplants chastity; the cinema supplants recreation, especially prayer; managerial and propaganda techniques replace older practise and virtues of loyalty, etc.” He sees in the application of this technology a change in habits and customs of peoples, making their interactions less humane and human, less cognizant of human dignity, and encouraging them to treat each other and even themselves as objects in a material world rather than subjects of a metaphysical world.

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HERE’S a nice bit of propaganda for baby selling. A British woman, Tara Sawyer, says she is so “addicted” to being pregnant that she is happy to be a surrogate mother and will continue to bear — and give away — as many children as possible, reportedly for no pay. She is the maternal counterpart of all those British women who go on binge drinking sprees in pubs. But she gets pregnant instead. She’s a gestational drunk. In keeping with her narcissistic view of pregnancy as something that is good because it makes a woman feel high, she says she has felt no attachment to the three babies she has given away to homosexuals, even though they were her biological children. Her husband goes along. Supposedly no pay is involved, so technically we cannot call him a pimp. The British national health service subsidizes it too.

How did Tara’s story end up in the newspaper? Did an enterprising reporter come across Tara? Or did someone who profits from surrogacy contact the newspaper? We will never know. But one thing we do know is that the baby-selling industry in the United States and Britain is big and there is almost no chance of it being ended under our existing political order. (more…)

KARL D. writes:

I find nothing more entertaining than when liberals eat each other for lunch. I just sit back and smile. We are now finding out more as to why Jill Abramson was fired from her job as editor of The New York Times. From the gist of it it seems it was mostly due to all the faux testosterone that Abramson was throwing around. Something almost all female high flying execs do. At the same time she was pulling out the feminist big guns to complain about her pay package compared to the last editor who was (gasp) a male. She has been replaced with the first black editor of The New York Times. So all the liberal stars are back in alignment. Yet there is still a big stink in feminist land about her firing. I suppose in the prevailing view Abramson should have had the job for life, simply because she is a woman. Above is a photo of Abramson that her daughter uploaded in her support after she was fired. Kinda says it all doesn’t it?

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JAMES N. writes:

After some reflection, I’ve developed some nuanced opinions about this story of the police commissioner in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire. This guy was sitting in Nolan’s, a family restaurant with a small dining room and bar. When you dine at Nolan’s, your fellow diners are not far away.

Excuse the profanity, but he called Obama a “f***ing nigger,” and when a person close by demurred, he snapped back something to the effect, “Yeah, I said it!”

Now when I was growing up, people, particularly our elders whom we were taught to respect, didn’t call anybody a f***ing anything in public. That remains a standard to which we should aspire. If this man had called Obama a “f***ing asshole,” for example, he should have been embarrassed at the least, especially if, as is quite likely, there were children within earshot.

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