IN the entry on television shows from the 1950s, the reader Joe A. does not agree that it was an era of wholesome entertainment. Joe writes of “Lassie:”

The father is unquestioning to external authority. Be it the town mayor, military officers, policemen, “experts,” Hugh Reilly never fails to submit meekly and obediently. June Lockhart exemplifies a form of “Prairie” or perhaps “Heartland” feminism in which, while outwardly submissive to her husband, she is actually his numinous better and the font of wisdom and correct behavior. This is also one of the first examples of a television family in which the child Timmy, played by Tommy Rettig, often schooled his father and indirectly his mother, on the true importance of a child’s wishes and perspective. Weak father, elevated mother, and a twist on the Noble Savage is a good short description of the unrecognized basis to “Lassie.

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  FROM William Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode (1743-1745)

IN “Christian Schools and Racial Realities,” an article in the latest issue of Touchstone magazine, Hunter Baker, a professor of political science at Union University, calls on white Southern Protestants to integrate their private schools. Many private schools are tainted because they were formed when the federal government ordered racial integration of public schools, and while Protestants have other issues with public schooling today, their failure to achieve diversity in these schools is immoral, Baker writes. Baker comes close to advocating that Protestants send their children to public schools where crime and “negative social fashions” are rampant, but he ends by recommending that they find ways to recruit blacks and bring them into their schools, apparently at a reduced tuition rate. He writes:

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AN editorial in The New Scientist argues for humanitarian aid to Syrian victims of chemical weapons:

It is highly improbable that the threat [of chemical weapons in Syria] can be reduced by bombing the stockpiles (see “Wind and rockets key clues in Syrian chemical puzzle” and “Iraq offers grim lessons for Syrian gas survivors“). Giving people the means to protect themselves is much better.

Iranian toxicologists who studied the victims of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s found that administering antidotes to nerve agents – mainly atropine and pralidoxime injected into muscle – in the hours and days after a sarin attack can save lives and reduce the chances of chronic symptoms in survivors. Even cheap alternatives such as sodium bicarbonate and magnesium sulphate can help. (more…)

THERE are more than 800 comments after today’s New York Times article about a potential military strike on Syria. Though they are notably devoid of the blistering, rabid hatred directed to George W. Bush in 2003, and a few comments blame everything on Bush, they are overwhelmingly negative. They include comments such as this:

This is being done for Obama to save face. Those who support this don’t understand what we are getting into. Obama is the most disliked President ever. He is a complete failure and to show his manhood he wants to do this. What a pathetic little man. Remember 9-11, thats [sic] who we are supporting, the legacy of Bid Laden [sic]. I’m ashamed to be an American. I can honestly say I am embarrassed every time Obama and Pelosi and McCain open their mouths. There is no justification for a strike.

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ALAN writes:

I would like to confirm Paul’s remark about the “virtuous delightfulness” of American television programs for children in the 1950s. I was there too, and I remember it well.

Children in the 1950s were the last generation to grow up in homes that were not saturated by television. It was there, but our parents used it selectively. They were principled enough to permit us to enjoy it in limited doses. They did not permit it to dominate our lives or theirs.

Because of that, children who grew up in the 1950s still spent thousands of hours of their childhoods actually doing things instead of watching other people do things on TV. To replace the former with the latter is, in effect, to neutralize children’s capacity to think, imagine, and initiate;  to pre-empt the most vitally important part of childhood, which is play (consisting equally of imagination and self-initiated activities);  and to produce a generation of spectators, sycophants, and trend-followers.

Modern parents who imagine they are doing their children a favor by exposing them to TV (any TV) from infancy onward are tragically mistaken.  They would do them a favor by not having any TV at all in their homes.

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  FRENCH President François Hollande suggested earlier this year that in the interest of equality more women should be among the 74 celebrated figures buried in the crypt of the famous Panthéon in Paris. So far only two women are buried there: Marie Curie and Sophie Berthelot, who is there on the merits of her husband, the chemist Marcellin Berthelot. A feminist group Osez le Féminisme (Dare To Be a Feminist) has been pressing the cause and a poll is being held to decide on women who qualify, with the favored candidates including Simone de Beauvoir and Olympe de Gouge, an advocate of women's rights during the French Revolution. Those who say there should be more women in the necropolis have a point. Many of the men buried in the Panthéon, which dates to the early years of the French Revolution, were revolutionary figures. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Marat (who was later disinterred)  are among those who were buried there. (See a full list here.) Famous feminists such as De Beauvoir and De Gouge fit in with the spirit of the mausoleum. The irony is that none of the women candidates for interment today had the enormous power and influence of the immortal female figure who stands behind the Panthéon: Saint Genevieve, (422-512), the patron saint of Paris. The Panthéon, in the Latin Quarter, was originally intended by Louis XV to be a church dedicated to the saint, replacing a former abbey in her name. The king vowed in 1744 that…

ROB writes:

I started my working career firmly believing (without evidence or experience, of course!) that men and women are equally suited to the professional workplace, and I have worked beside, and sometimes for, women all my life. I have had many able female subordinates, colleagues and bosses. However, my experience of working with them has been profoundly different from my expectations. I have generally found women in the professional workplace to be less collegial than men. With a few notable exceptions, the women I have worked with are quick to see any disagreement or criticism as impugning their competence. Time and effort goes into dancing around their sensitivities which would have been better spent on getting the job done. It is true there are some men like this as well, but not the majority.

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I HAVEN’T seen the movie The Butler, but I feel as if I have seen it. Aren’t we living through a similar exercise in fiction every single day? Take our president. He’s not a noble butler facing a world of inept and evil white power, but he is starring in a similarly uplifting film called The President, also featuring Oprah on screens near you. Obama’s not really a president. He’s never really been a president, but he has been acting like one. He’s been playing this role so long it comes naturally most of the time, although when he has to act as a president who is very, very serious, as presidents often are, there is the slight temptation, ever present, to smile. He holds it in.

Right now, the President is acting the role of a president in a military crisis. The plot switches to Syria, a Middle Eastern country in need of America the Free to sort everything out. The brilliant, creative producers have decided that pilots flying Cruise missiles and pyrotechnic explosions would help the plot. It’s only natural that the viewers want to see the President, who is the main character, do something. There will be scenes of him at the war table, surrounded by his advisers. His sleeves will be rolled up and he will look authoritative and concerned. He will also be shown mid-stride on the tarmac of Air Force One with that very, very serious expression. The President is about to launch a military strike without Congressional approval and for no compelling national interest (they couldn’t fit that in) other than the dictates of the script. He has a large cast of actors to play along and expensive, high-tech props. The scenes will be so realistic that real people will die, a real international crisis will result and America will really commit a “moral obscenity.” But that’s the price of art and besides this amazing, fast-paced, action-packed movie called The President is free for everyone.

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MILEY CYRUS, the former Disney child actress widely viewed a few years ago as wholesome, is now just a porn star. But she’s been heading that way for years. Much has been written about her raunchy performance for MTV Sunday, in which she simulated sexual intercourse and masturbation, a performance which was almost certainly calculated to bring on just the sort of controversy it inspired.

There is only one proper response to a performance such as Miley’s. She should have been immediately arrested for public obscenity. But we don’t live in a sane world. Porn is perfectly legal. Miley was expressing her First Amendment rights.

M. Catherine Evans writes about her performance at The American Thinker : (more…)

  THE British Catholic blogger Mundabor writes about the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent remarks on the legalization of sodomite unions. Mundabor writes: Anglicanism has become a heathenish cult of man with no resemblance anymore to any Christian thinking worth[y] of the name. What a bunch of clowns, what a cartoon “religion”.

    DON VINCENZO writes: I know not whether the next gaffe of Pope Francis will be liturgical or ecclesiastical, but what I do know is that the Holy Father lives, with regard to the situation in the Middle East, in a delusional world. See this recent piece by the Society of St. Pius X about the Supreme Pontiff's remarks urging Christians to respect the teachings, symbols and values of Islam. In this delusional state, the Pope is far-too-quiet about the fate of Middle Eastern Christians, especially as our valiant Commander-in-Chief verges on sending Cruise missiles into Syria. Perhaps instead of having the parishes hear a sermon on why amnesty for illegal aliens is virtuous, the Vatican should lay out the whys and wherefores of what is happening in Syria, including the commentary of the Mother Superior of the convent of Homs, Syria. It was she - Mother Marie de la Croix - who actually spoke at the Vatican a year or so ago, but received little attention. Why wasn't she afforded the opportunity to tell her story worldwide? The victory of the "Syrian Rebel Army" will be the death knell of Christians in that ancient land and the Pontiff and the Mother Superior and the Vatican bureaucrats know this; yet, this Pontiff sees fit to laud the religious belief that brings men to destroy the Church.

  SCOTT H. writes: Talk about drinking parties, here's one for you (actually it's a two'fer): Accuser testifies at Naval Academy sex assault hearing. "WASHINGTON –  A midshipman testified Wednesday that she didn't remember being sexually assaulted by three former Navy football players after a night of heavy drinking, but she said one of the men told her she had sex with him and another accused player." Drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, but this midshipman is now a senior at the Naval Academy soon to be leading "people." She states she had consensual sex with someone else when she woke up the next day. Classy broad. It's no wonder my son in Afghanistan, who's team is obligated to have female attachments, has zero respect for female military members. The females are derisively refered to as "mattress pads."

IN 1336, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux, now part of the Alps in southern France, with his brother and two servants. The mountain is over 6,000 feet high. At that time, recreational mountain climbing was rare. Here is a letter the poet wrote about their excursion. From the letter:

We found an old shepherd in one of the mountain dales, who tried, at great length, to dissuade us from the ascent, saying that some fifty years before he had, in the same ardour of youth, reached the summit, but had gotten for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars. No one, so far as he or his companions knew, had ever tried the ascent before or after him. But his counsels increased rather than diminished our desire to proceed, since youth is suspicious of warnings. (more…)

A READER writes:

Please forgive my poor English. It is not my first language.

So, a little background: I’m a 20-year-old college student in a major university in my country, currently in the third year of my undergraduate course. As a good fraction of male college students, I come from a very socially awkward adolescence, and, as soon as I got in college, I was desperate to go to all the parties, and drink all the alcohol, and please myself from all the college girls that would be anxiously waiting for me, in these places. I should have gone to a total of about 20-30 parties, until a few months ago.

It turned out that all the repressed feelings of my adolescence that brought me into this quest lead me to nothing but a deep sense of disappointment. I have found that alcohol is not the happiness potion that people try to make it seem to be; that most people who call themselves “friends” of yours want nothing with you but to not leave them alone in these parties; and, most importantly, that the process of finding mates in these parties is the most humiliating and hurtful thing I have ever subjected myself to. (more…)

DAVID J. writes:

Good day! While perusing the CNN website recently, I came upon a nearly cheesecake photograph of Marissa Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo! The picture, intended for this spread in Vogue magazine, immediately reminded me of the following maxim by the late Lawrence Auster.

When men occupy a high office, it is for the purpose of doing a job. The job comes first. When women occupy a high office, it is for their self and their vanity. Public boasting about their “power” comes first, along with displays of themselves.

It is astonishing that Ms. Mayer devotes so much time seeking attention about her position and marketing her attractiveness.  Feminists consider it a victory that a woman has ascended atop the corporate world, especially in the hyper-competitive field of high technology.  Feminism states that women are more than mere sexual objects and can do everything that men can do (and equally as well).

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