1. In an NPR interview in 2001, Obama sharply criticized the Constitution for guaranteeing ‘negative liberties,’ i.e. for restricting the government in order to protect the liberty of the individual, but not ‘positive liberties,’ as embodied in welfare and other ‘rights’ similar to those found in the constitutions of Cuba, North Korea, China, and Stalinist Russia. O referred to “the so-called Founding Fathers.”
2. Last summer, O made this confession of his utter alienation from and hatred of our country’s creed: (more…)
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IN A PREVIOUSentry, I quoted Kidist P. Asrat on the ugliness of Asian urban neighborhoods in Toronto. Readers noted that by comparison they are no worse than the trashy architecture pervasive in Canada and America, a point to which I responded.
Jay from Goshen adds to the discussion:
If a municipality wants to take the trouble, it can pass ordinances that even McDonald’s has to follow. That is why in some locales, McDonald’s restaurants look not only inconspicuous, but attractive. My family and I drove a long distance once in a very isolated part of the southwest. We finally found a McDonald’s. Normally I hate the place, but in that instance, it was comforting and reassuring. It was constructed of local materials and that normally garish golden arch was small, and attractive, under the circumstances. (more…)
THE Rubio-Schumer immigration bill easily passed its first hurdle in the Senate today as senators voted, 82-15, to move it to the floor for debate. See Senator Tim Kaine, Virginia Democrat, delivering a speech in favor of the bill in Spanish here. He did not deliver an English version during his speech. The day when such a thing would have been unthinkable is long since passed.
Most of the country’s 11 million illegal aliens would receive green cards under the measure and legal immigration levels would double. Here is a report by Norman Matloff, posted previously at VDARE, on the proposed increase in legal immigration for high-tech workers. Countering the argument that the country needs the skills of foreign engineers, Matloff says the availability of foreign high-tech labor is responsible for an “internal brain drain in the United States.”
THE Obama administration has dropped its weak attempt to keep the Morning-After-Pill from availability without a prescription for girls as young as 11. So much for the vaunted concern of the president for the health and welfare of young girls. And so much for the righteousness of feminists, who say they stand for the welfare of women when they are seeking to harm them in ever more novel ways.
Here are some facts about levonorgestrel, the key ingredient in the pill. Notice this: (more…)
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THE French demonstrations against same-sex "marriage" represent a profound development -- the emergence of a true anti-liberal movement in Europe. Here is more evidence that France is awakening. George Buscemi, at LifeSiteNews, reports on the Antigones, a group of traditional women who've named themselves after the Greek mythical heroine who refused to abide by a tyrannical law that kept her from burying her brother. The Antigones specifically oppose the feminist group, FEMEN, whose members appear in public with bared breasts to commit frenzied acts of protest and vandalism. This is part of the Antigones' manifesto: “Femen, you affirm that a woman’s fight is feminist, we say that it is feminine. “Femen, you affirm that women’s rights are defended with bared breasts, we say that they are acquired through dignity. “Femen, you affirm that religion is alienation; we say that for many of us it is the way to freedom and self-realisation. “Femen, you affirm that machismo dominates society and you combat men. We answer that it is only with men that we can truly become women, whole and complete.” Judging from this report, genuine anti-feminism has gained a voice in France. Needless to say, these lovely women have already been labeled right-wing extremists. Something tells me they will not receive the pervasive coverage accorded FEMEN. We don't live in an era of outright censorship. The good, the true and the beautiful are just deliberately ignored.
There is an angle to this story about an IRS agent bullying a woman from a pro-life group that I believe most people will miss: immigration.
The agent in question, Sherry Wan, is likely a not-so-recent Chinese immigrant judging by her accent and the fact that she is employed by the federal government.
Government affirmative action programs lead to the government being filled with a high proportion of immigrants relative to general society. When we import people from societies that do not share our worldview, we end up with a society, and in this case, a government, that is less likely to share our worldview.
KIDIST P. ASRAT, at Reclaiming Beauty,counters the argument that mass immigration to Toronto has made it a more vibrant city. She writes:
Yet, when we go to the areas most densely populated by these “ethnics” all we see are deteriorating restaurants and dull, colorless houses. So much for vibrancy. Even those areas where reasonably well-to-do (these days they are “Asians” – i.e. Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, and the South Asians – i.e. Indians and Pakistani) immigrants reside, we find generally inferior homes, with no landscaping or maintenance of the surroundings. Dull and lusterless places.
We live close to a large lake in a neighborhood that’s generally safe for the children to sort of roam around as long as we know where they are and what they’re doing. One thing we allow the older children to do is to go down to the lake to fish as long as there is someone to accompany them.
A couple of weeks ago our 16-year-old daughter and our 12-year-old son went down to the lake to fish, where later a 17-year-old boy (not from the neighborhood) happened along and showed some interest in our daughter. When he asked her for a date, she answered that he would “have to talk to my Dad.” (more…)
Phyllis Richman, a woman who applied to a graduate professional program at Harvard in 1961, finds a letter in which a Harvard faculty member asked her how she planned to balance her career with her family obligations. A half-century later, she wrote him a rude letter in response. He responded:
Here is an article from The Daily Mail. It seems some Swedish men who work the trains are now wearing skirts in lieu of shorts since the company banned them for men. The company claims it can do nothing. To tell them not to wear skirts would be “discrimination.” What’s even sadder, out of the 176 comments on the story, the vast majority (I’d say somewhere close to 99.5 percent) are supportive!
Do these two creatures look like men to you? If I were a woman I could not look at these two as men who would be good providers, protectors or strong male father figures to my children.
The entrance of the Railway Exchange Building in St. Louis. It once housed the Famous-Barr department store
ALAN writes:
The last remaining department store in downtown St. Louis has announced it will close this summer.
That came as no surprise to me. Only the willfully blind could imagine downtown is not dying. A man who opened a restaurant downtown in 1968 was calling it “done-town” by the time he retired in 2005. I knew he was right because I, too, had watched it decline, year after year.
The department store is Macy’s but it was known for most of its life as Famous-Barr, a May Company store with ten floors of merchandise in a beautiful building called the Railway Exchange Building in the heart of downtown. One of my uncles worked there in the Katy Railroad office from the 1920s to the 1950s.
How well I remember walking into the store through its brass revolving doors and riding the escalators to the upper floors. My father and I spent many hours browsing in the large book department on the sixth floor. Mannequins in a display window of the soon-to-close department store now wear backward baseball caps – a splendid example of trickle-up stupidity that Diana West could include in an updated edition of The Death of The Grown-Up. It symbolizes what happened between 1959 and now: A department store run by grown-ups was surrendered to people who take their cues from adolescents.
A RECENT Pew Research Survey titled “Breadwinner Moms,” discussed here, would have been more accurately titled, “Breadwinner Dads.” For the fact is the vast majority of mothers are financially dependent on men, either directly on the earnings of men who are the father of their children or indirectly in the form of public assistance. A third of the so-called “breadwinner moms” are not even working. That’s some kind of bread.
Not only are many of the “breadwinner moms” on government assistance, almost 70 percent of surveyed women with children under 18 would rather not be working full-time. I realize this is common sense, but it is common sense that is not very common. Since it is hard to support a family on part-time work, essentially these women are saying they would like a male breadwinner around or some other source of funding. If it is true that most mothers would prefer not to depend on their own resources, shouldn’t the thrust of public policy be to employ men first, rather than to pursue so-called equality?
THE AMERICAN Academy of Arts ad Sciences is one of the most hallowed intellectual institutions in American history. It was founded in 1780 to promote scholarship in the arts and sciences. John Adams was its first president. The Academy, which has come a long way from its beginnings as an aristocratic preserve of learning, is in the news because its second female president faces accusations that she lied on grants and misrepresented her academic credentials, saying she had a doctorate when she did not. Leslie Cohen Berlowitz makes $598,000 as the organization's president. The board says its stands by her and doubts the charges. She blames the error on her staff. Regardless of whether Berlowitz lied, one wonders how a woman who has never authored a book on her own, does not possess great academic distinction and whose highest previous position was as director of institutional development for New York University achieved such an exalted position and such high remuneration. The Academy has apparently gone the way of other liberal institutions: to the elevation of mediocrity. Interestingly, Berlowitz is known for what the New York Times calls a "sharp-elbowed management style." This is a nice way of saying she was hated by her underlings. How utterly surprising. As we all know women in management are always conciliatory and congenial. That's why we need women at the top to change the world.
AT The American Thinker, Daren Jonescu writes about the rash of punitive measures against boys with imaginary guns in schools. The boys are guilty, as Jonescu points out, of thought crimes. Jonescu is not foolish enough to believe that these are manifestations of extremism in a fundamentally sound system. He has written a number of articles condemning public education altogether. I highly recommend them and entirely agree with his working premise. Jonescu writes in another piece: There are several major obstacles to overcome if there is to be any hope of saving civilization from the grip of the authoritarian pre-education camps we call "public schools." The most stubborn obstacle of all, however, is perhaps the one embedded in our own hearts, namely the all too human instinct to comfort ourselves with the thought that the soul-deforming corruptions of public education began in earnest only after our own school days, and hence that we ourselves escaped the harm we so easily recognize in others. Among those soul-deforming corruptions, as the blogger Sunshine Mary points out, is the effort to turn boys into girls and girls into boys. No amount of tinkering with girls and boys sports program will fundamentally alter the effort by public education to create an artificial unisex world. The goal of public education is to cultivate passivity. Masculinity and femininity are empowering.
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FIFTH Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Edith Jones faces a formal complaint of judicial misconduct for stating in a lecture at the University of Pennsylvania in February that nonwhites commit more violent crimes than whites. Steve Sailer writes about the case, which involves several comments made by Jones, at VDARE. And, here is a rebuttal to the charges at the legal blog Above the Law, where Tamara Tabo writes:
While there’s not enough space here to evaluate each of the charges the complaint makes, let’s have a closer look at a few of them, starting with her alleged comments on race.
According to the complaint, Judge Jones asserted that “certain racial groups commit more of these crimes than others.” She said that “[s]adly some groups seem to commit more heinous crimes than others.” When asked to explain her remarks, she stated that there was “no arguing” that “Blacks and Hispanics” outnumber “Anglos” on death row and “sadly” it was a “statistical fact” that people “from these racial groups get involved in more violent crime.” (more…)
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IN A debate on homosexual “marriage,” Bishop Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois recounted the 2002 murder of his secretary, a mother of four, by a homosexual man, Lifesitenews reports. (more…)
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AT Reclaiming Beauty, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes about the art of the musical fugue:
Musically and rhetorically, fugue exerts the effect of enthralling the listener to participate in the imaginative equivalent of flight, pursuit, and redemption – or flight, pursuit, and transfiguration. (more…)
