IN this recent entry on idiotic, meaningless names, a reader mentions a blogger who keeps track of the names of babies born in Rexburg, a largely Mormon town in Idaho. Parents in Rexburg outdo each other with novel spellings and ugly names such as Sharlee and Jaxson. The blogger, named Jessica, writes:

My husband and I used to live in a little town in Southeastern Idaho called Rexburg. There’s a culture there, and in surrounding areas (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, UTAH) of people giving their children all manner of atrocious made-up and misspelled names. (People outside of Idaho and Utah do too, of course, but these two states are trendsetters – see here if you disagree.) (more…)

ALEX A. writes from England:

ACCORDING to news reports, Aaron Alexis, the 34-year-old man who allegedly shot 12 people at the Washington D.C. Navy Yard yesterday, believed he was the victim of racial bias and was angry about it. See this Los Angeles Times report:

Ty Thairintr, 52, a Fort Worth tooling design engineer, said he met Alexis about five years ago, when Alexis was still in the Navy. “He told me he believed he had superior abilities to his co-workers but he didn’t get promoted,” he said. “He complained about the rank and file not giving him respect.”

Alexis felt discriminated against because he was black, he said.

However, it is much more likely that Alexis was the beneficiary, not the victim, of racial bias and that this massacre was due in part to racial affirmative action. How else to explain the hiring of Alexis by the IT company “The Experts” even though he was without significant IT experience, even a college degree. The company gave Alexis security clearance despite numerous arrests for aggressive behavior and despite his discharge from the Navy for what a naval spokesman said was “a pattern of misconduct.” Without the security clearance, Alexis could not have entered the office building yesterday. From the Wall Street Journal: (more…)

MS. FOX writes:

We Canadians have age-old rivalries between the Anglophones of western Canada, and the Francophones of the east. Quebec has, several times over the years, wanted to become its own nation. So far, it has failed in this project, but now it has more pressing concerns.

Islam is one of them. In Quebec, a new “Charter of Values” has been unveiled by the Parti Quebeçois and it would forbid civil servants to wear overt religious symbols such as head scarves, burkas and large crucifixes on the job. According to Maclean’s, thousands of Muslims have protested. It has not been the first incident. Earlier in 2013, there was controversy about Islamic sheikhs wearing headgear during soccer games. According to the official rules, they were not allowed to wear the coverings for their safety and others’, but they did not want to hear it. A protest was launched, and a thousand Muslims wore headgear to a game. (more…)

NINA DAVULURI, the beautiful and talented daughter of Indian immigrants, was crowned Miss America yesterday. Some anonymous commenters on social media have criticized the choice of an Indian woman and have been branded racist. Most Americans, if asked, would probably agree that it is “racist” to object. They would not view Indians as “racist” if they refused to choose the white daughter of American immigrants as a national symbol. But cultural pride is for others. Cultural pride is for those who are not white.

Miss Davuluri says she has always seen herself as an American first. But this does not appear to be true, nor should it be true, given that most Indian immigrants naturally feel a strong connection to India. In the talent competition, Davuluri did a Bollywood fusion dance (I did not see the pageant) and her comments afterward suggest that she is proud that the pageant chose her as a symbol of “diversity.” In other words, she is proud that she is not a white American. “I’m so happy this organization has embraced diversity,” she said. “I’m thankful there are children watching at home who can finally relate to a new Miss America.”

But if there are children at home who relate to her purely because she is Indian and not white, then there also must be children at home, namely white children, who do not relate to her because she is Indian and not white. In other words, Davuluri admits that instead of being a universalist, she is for a particular culture. Multiculturalism, as is so often the case, is a cover for the erasure of a specific culture. Davuluri’s platform was “celebrating diversity through cultural competency,” an inherently contradictory statement and an admission of the truth, which is that human beings are incapable of “diversity.”

It is just the kind of political newspeak, however, that one would expect from a Miss America contestant. The increasingly tawdry pageant has always gone with the zeitgeist and with whatever sells in corporate America. Today the contestants brag about their planned careers and wear bikinis. Miss Kansas is an Army sergeant with tattoos. The pageant struggles to hold the public’s interest in an age when half-naked women are no longer a novelty. Unsurprisingly, Davuluri plans to be a doctor, joining the ranks of the many female Indian doctors in America, women for whom education and career are the highest goals in life and who are often ruthlessly pressured by their parents. They belong to a distinct American subculture. They are part of America, but at a deep level they are Indian.

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AT The Orthosphere, in an essay titled “Why You Need Traditionalism,” Alan Roebuck poses the question, “How can you escape the nightmare of the contemporary world?”

His response in part:

Know first that you cannot save yourself. You are too small. You need to discover, believe and participate in something larger than yourself, something that connects you with the realities that the contemporary world denies: God, true religion, family, nation, and so on. You need the traditionalism of your people.

Traditionalism is not just adherence to a tradition, for there must be a reason why we adhere to it. More basically, traditionalism is knowing and living in accord with what many thinkers call the order of being. Contemporary thought holds that the world is only a physical realm in which any meaning or order that transcends the physical is arbitrarily projected by man. And since this order is arbitrary, man can change it whenever he wants. But contemporary thought is mistaken. The world contains a God-given order that pre-exists man, and that he knows primarily through intuition, his faculty of knowing basic truths without a process of formal reasoning.

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  GILBERT STUART'S painting of Mrs. Richard Yates (1795), the wife of a New York merchant, is one of the most loved of American portraits. Stuart, highly successful in England and America, is most famous for his unfinished portrait of George Washington and his paintings of five other presidents, but none of his works is superior to this. The greatest portraits aim to show not just beauty or status, but character. On this level, Mrs. Richard Yates, peering up from her needlework, is a triumph. The artist Stan Washburn describes it at his art site: It could be a portrait of a formidable New England matron I observed as a child, one Miss Twitchell (really), a person of vast sternness. She was obviously not the model for this painting, but body and soul it’s just how I remember her. She was a bank teller in Gorham, a small New Hampshire town. That bank was not, as banks are now, an open, welcoming institution. Upon entry you were confronted with a floor-to-ceiling wooden partition with a small, closely-barred window behind which lurked Miss Twitchell. One day a robber came in, stuck the muzzle of a pistol between the bars, and said, “Gimme the money.” “Won’t,” snapped Miss Twitchell, and dropped to the floor, out of sight. The bars were substantial, the door from the lobby to the rear area was locked; there was nothing the robber could do. He fled, empty-handed.

THE Birmingham Metropolitan College in England yesterday lifted its ban on the niqab, the full Islamic face veil, after a student petition collected 8,000 signatures opposed to the restriction and a protest was planned. Here from The Birmingham Mail is the statement by the college, a tour de force of dhimmi public relations:

We are concerned that recent media attention is detracting from our core mission of providing high quality learning. As a consequence, we will modify our policies to allow individuals to wear specific items of personal clothing to reflect their cultural values.

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THERE are several strange facets to Pope Francis’s recent phone call to Anna Romano, a 35-year-old divorced woman in Italy. The woman is pregnant with a child conceived with a married man and the pope offered her only praise. See Margaret Galitzin’s analysis of this latest publicity stunt of the “who-am-I-to-judge” pope.

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ALEX writes:

In one more step in the march to true equality, the Left has identified another group in need of protection and with a potential for enlarging the Democrats’ voter base: less attractive people, who, of course, are discriminated against in all areas of life in favor of more attractive people:

Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in personal-injury courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection. There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned consciousness-raising has a role to play, too. (more…)

IN a 2006 post at Gates Of Vienna, Baron Bodissey described the Battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683, when the Christian army under Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland, ended the Muslim siege of the city:

It was then, at the last possible moment on the evening of September 11th, that Jan Sobieski arrived at a hill north of the city, leading a force of 40,000 Poles and their German and Austrian allies. The battle began soon afterwards, in the early morning hours of September 12th. (more…)

EVERY DAY, at this time of year, I find one or two crickets in our house. This morning, a dark brown Field Cricket, on the edge of the kitchen sink, waved its comically long antennae, its rear legs poised as always to leap. Who can begrudge a cricket a temporary home? He destroys nothing. He takes nothing, and he chirps with friendly optimism as he sits under the bed or a dresser. In a few weeks, the grass and woods around our home in Pennsylvania will be relatively silent. The throbbing pulse of cricket communication will be gone.

Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist wrote that there are few things on earth more delightful than the sound of crickets. I agree. In his Book of Insects, Fabre wrote: (more…)

AT Big Truth, William Irons writes on the bizarre neologisms that black Americans use to name their children:

The sad fact is that the way black people in America name their children reflects an abandonment of culture, and abandonment of history. However optimistically disingenuous white liberals …. spin it, the reality is that their names have no grounding in a larger coherent culture, and there are not larger truths being passed on to black children by their parents. If anything, they are being taught – on a basic level – that rejection of white Western culture is their cultural ideal, their highest truth. So when young Kanthony asks his mama where his name came from, she just shrugs and says, “Well basically I made it up. At least it ain’t white.”

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  AN ESSAY by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira at Tradition in Action looks at architecture that springs from regional influences. The essay is short, but profound.

OAK NORTON, of Utahns Against Common Core, examines in this video a current language arts textbook for first graders in public schools. The book, published by Zaner-Bloser and recommended by the federal Common Core program, explicitly urges children to become social activists and instructs them how to engage in emotional rhetoric to further collectivist goals. It is truly unashamed political indoctrination. As a commenter at Youtube said, “When I was 6 in Yugoslavia, we had to learn much less about glories of socialism then kids in Utah nowadays.”

At the blog Invisible Serfs Collar, Robin Eubank, a lawyer, writes of the goals of Common Core curricula. Children are to become social change agents. The writer Kenneth Minogue wrote of the advent of “the servile mind.” It can be found at a public school near you.

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BRUCE CHARLTON writes about the rhetorical malfeasance of liberals. As he puts it, “The Left isn’t winning by having good arguments – it wins because people are punished for arguing against the Left.” He continues:

This is one of the things I find most frustrating, and increasingly frustrating: not so much that it happens, but that so many people cannot see that it is happening.

[…]

There have been plenty of examples of coercive repression of opposition, indeed something of the sort is necessary to stable government – yet has there ever before been a situation where so many people are unaware of the coercion, deny the coercion, or think that it doesn’t make any significant difference, or that they personally can easily ‘see through’ the dense cloud of swirling lies which surrounds them?

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Although I oppose U.S. intervention in Syria for any purpose short of retaliation in the event of a direct attack by Syrian forces on American territory or U.S. interests (neither of which has happened, nor is likely), there is still room for nuance in looking at the U.S. government response to what is happening in Syria – and by extension throughout Arab-ruled lands.

One nuance is just whom U.S. intervention would benefit – whether or not it is true that the Assad regime was behind the recent chemical attacks, which still looks to me like a case not proved.

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