JR writes:

You said in your post about the Atlanta cheating scandal: 

At the heart of this scandal is the failure to recognize that blacks should not be held to impossible standards. It is not right. Black education should be different from white education. It is not compassionate to deny racial differences. (more…)

  IN THE discussion of the latest prominent news story about a mother who forgot her child not once but twice in her parked car and has been charged with his death, Josh F. writes: I am in the process of raising a fourth two-year-old. The idea that one could forget a two-year-old in the car seems impossible. A child this age will almost certainly either be requiring constant attention or will have fallen asleep alerting one to this occasionally alleviating event. Exactly. These deaths are inconceivable. These events are mind-blowing. Even if they are rare, they are the extreme manifestation of something very common: a callous detachment from the young. Liberalism has endlessly encouraged and celebrated this state of detachment in mothers. The fact that it has also encouraged parents to spoil and indulge their children, to shower them with gifts and gadgets, does not negate its murderous indifference. Indulgence and neglect are part of the same cultural phenomenon. The child alone in his car seat, strapped in, crying in bewilderment, slowly dying from hyperthermia while his parent files papers or answers phones a few yards away, is the inevitable consequence of a radical estrangement between the generations and the withering away of the institution that protects the vulnerable: the traditional family.

LAURENCE B. writes:

One angle that needs to be investigated with the recent Atlanta cheating scandal is the issue of parental awareness. It seems very unlikely to me that even parents of illiterate children wouldn’t notice or question the otherwise inexplicable success of their otherwise underachieving children. (more…)

ALAN writes:

A reader wrote [What the Civil Rights Act Did for Blacks, Tuesday, July 5, 2011 ] about the effects of “The Great Society” do-gooder schemes like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 
 
Many people seem disillusioned by the realization that such do-gooder schemes did not benefit blacks all that much over the past forty years.  Of course they didn’t.  They were not intended to benefit blacks.  They were intended to benefit the Marxist, Communist, Socialist and other anti-American planners and agitators who engineered “The Great Society” and the “Civil Rights Movement.”  
 
How many of your readers know that a book entitled The Great Society was published in 1914 by a proponent of Fabian Socialism?  Or that the Fabian Socialists have been planning for more than a hundred years to make the United States into a Socialist nation?
 
To believe that the “Civil Rights Movement” was about Rights is like believing that the ACLU is a group of American patriots.  The truth is quite different:  The ACLU was founded by people whose long-range goal was to make America into a Communist nation.  “Civil liberties” was just the pretext.  The “Civil Rights Movement” was about Power and Revolution.  In both cases, most Americans – black and white alike – bought what the Socialists were selling. (more…)

WRITING in The American Thinker, Joel Levine examines “the coming indifference of American medicine.” The medical profession, he argues, has been transformed from a field imbued with heroic self-sacrifice to one characterized by a clock-punching mentality. The result is worse patient care.  As has been discussed here before, a major cause of this transformation, only obliquely referred to by Levine, is the large-scale entry of women into the profession. Today’s physician, Levine writes, virtually “advertises [his] fragility.” But why? Levine won’t come right out and say it. The entire culture has  changed because the doctor is more likely a woman.

Levine writes:

Thirty years ago, the training and practice of medicine was deeply rooted in “inherited” values as much as craft. Physicians were in a noble discipline recast into paladins protecting society, even a bit of its soul, against an implacable adversary. Training was both arduous and flawed (inflated egos and autocratic mice that roared) but with a central purpose. (more…)

A WASHINGTON, D.C.-area mother left her child alone in a minivan while she went to work in January and only remembered she had forgot to drop him off at day care when the day care center called to ask where he was. (more…)

 King Lear in New York - Steve Kogan - I HAD A strange and disconcerting night at the theater this spring, when my wife and I saw Derek Jacobi in the title role of Shakespeare's King Lear at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. On our subway ride back home, my feelings ran so high that we began to quarrel over their intensity, and it was only after we apologized to each either in the morning that I was able to express exactly why my emotions had been roiled. What follows grew out of what I said to her and what I later discovered when I read a review of the production in the New York Times. In my last two years of college, I took a one-year course on Shakespeare and a senior semester on Lear, which we read scene by scene and line by line. There was a time in my life when I went to the theater to see whatever works of his and his fellow dramatists were being performed in the city, and I developed a way of turning even mediocre acting to advantage by supplying my own imaginary performance as I let the familiar words sink in. When the acting was good, my absorption was complete. I also came of age when New York's museums were as quiet as a library, which is to say when libraries themselves were shelters for quiet study and reflection. Times have changed,…

Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918-1963 is a new book by Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher based on interviews with 89 men and women who married in the first half of the twentieth century. Bel Mooney writes about it in The Daily Mail:

From our perspective, the people telling their stories (many of whom must have died since) led repressed lives. Again and again old women recall their lack of knowledge about the sexual act, and their nervousness on the wedding night. (more…)

I WAS unfamiliar with the “My Fellow American” campaign until today. A spokeswoman named Elizabeth Potter politely urged me to ask my readers to take the pledge. Here it is:

Muslims are our fellow Americans. They are part of the national fabric that holds our country together. They contribute to America in many ways, and deserve the same respect as any of us. I pledge to spread this message, and affirm our country’s principles of liberty and justice for all. (more…)

A FORUM in The New York Times entitled “How Can We Get Men to Do More at Home?” is a classic illustration of the feminist program to remake human nature through state control and brainwashing. Participants in the discussion come right out and say that people must change their thinking. Equality is good even if people do not want it. Government should even “force” men to change.

“Mentalities generally change much more slowly than legal codifications and institutional policies,” Ute Frevert, director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, says. Communists repeated the same line until the very fall of the Berlin Wall. What can Ute tell us about life in her home?  Why would you listen to Ute more than, say, your great grandmother, who never welcomed the emasculation of her husband and would have been horrified to see him make a pie? Who knows more about men? (more…)

APPEARING AT the “Capitol Fourth” concert on the Mall in Washington, D.C. yesterday, the pop singer Josh Groban sang Simon and Garfunkel’s “America,” a paean to ennui and alienation. To the crowd gathered on the mall, and the millions who watched at home, it was perhaps enough that the melody was about their nation. This is an Americanism so automatic and unreflective, so perversely narcissistic, it does not even care when America is viewed as empty and meaningless – as long as it is the center of attention. Here are the lyrics, which describe a British couple traveling across America:

Let us be lovers, we’ll marry our fortunes together
I’ve got some real estate here in my bag”
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies
And walked off to look for America (more…)

GREG JINKERSON writes:

Regarding the thread about black culture under modern liberalism, I agree wholeheartedly that the Great Society scheme, particularly the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amounted to a huge step in the wrong direction for blacks politically. (more…)

WITH the charges against Dominique Strauss-Kahn almost certain to be dropped within the next few weeks, the question arises as to why management of the luxury hotel, Sofitel, vouched so strongly for the maid’s character.

According to some reports, the maid was engaging in illicit activities at the hotel. Even if the management did not know this or even if she was not earning money as a prostitute, it strains belief that she was the exemplary employee the hotel management insisted she was. (more…)

TEXANNE writes:

Emily Hall in this previous entry rightly admires her mother for the way she managed the household and children during many long absences of the father. Her description of her mother as being “both father and mother,” immediately struck a chord because, in a way, it seems to give short shrift to the reality of her father’s genuine significance and active role as head of the family. Even if he happened to be away fulfilling his obligations to his family,  they knew their father was real, knew who he was and why he was away and that he would come back.  (more…)

I HAVE been away from my computer for two days, celebrating my son’s graduation from high school. At VFR, there are many entries on the latest developments in the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, which appears to involve stunning prosecutorial ineptitude and prejudice. The credibility of the victim, a black African maid, appears to have been only superficially investigated before Strauss-Kahn was indicted, suggesting an overeagerness to  believe her and to accuse a famous man. The latest entry can be found here.

At Galliwatch, a blog devoted to current events in France, Tiberge writes of the new revelations: (more…)

THIS RECIPE is from Roy Finamore’s excellent book One Potato, Two Potato. The cake is unconventional because the batter includes potato, which makes it moist and earthy. It is best if made a day ahead of time. For Fourth of July, you can make this a flag cake in a 9×13 sheet pan and top it with vanilla or boiled icing. Make red stripes with food coloring applied to a small amount of icing and use blueberries for stars. My mother always made a flag cake on July Fourth. 

When my husband was a child he misheard the name of the holiday. He thought July Fourth was “July Force.” That makes sense in a way. The day has all the force of July.

Farmhouse Chocolate Cake
Makes one 10-inch tube cake

3/4 pound all-purpose potatoes, peeled and cut into chunks
Coarse salt
Cocoa powder for dusting
5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped
2 tablespoons honey (more…)

THE Rev. James Jackson writes:

With the beautiful paintings you’ve been posting lately, I thought you might enjoy this poem.
 
TO AN OAK TREE

           — E.C. Wells

Three hundred changing summers, winters too,
Since first the quivering sapling struggled through,
A hundred thousand days since you were born,
And took to earth from out the green acorn.
Survived the pounding hoof and rooting pig,
Put out first fragile arms, and then the big. (more…)