SHERYL SANDBERG says putting even more women in power will lead to a decline in sexual harassment. By that logic, sexual misconduct in the workplace should have declined dramatically in recent years.

Feminists are so tedious. They constantly talk about how great women are. If women lack the ability to ward off sexual aggression, how can they have the ability to lead major companies?

Sandberg is a home-wrecker. It’s in her interest to weaken the domestic fortress. Read More »

THE Pizza Industrial Complex is not to be out-done when it comes to fashion. Pizza Hut offers this stylish winter coat — something to consider this gift-giving season. (Thank you to Reader Dan R.)

KYLE writes:

It’s really not my style to pay tribute to strange people on the internet whom I’ve never met in person, but you should know that your observations have helped me see life differently. When I found your site it was like I’d finally found a cozy, Austenian place I could go and see the pure things in life through the eyes of someone who understands what true beauty is.

I pray that you don’t lose heart in these times. I guess we all struggle with despair in today’s world. I do, too. I know many people of your generation who are decent people, dismayed by the vulgar culture around us. I’m a millennial Kentucky boy. I grew up in a time of Jerry Springer, online pornography, hook-up culture, DARE drug resistance education and the urbanization of suburban America through rap “music.” I’ve had my fill of it all. As long as I have an ounce of gumption and the Lord wills it, I’ll do my part to inform others of my generation and help bring back the good times, if there are any to be had.

I have more gray hair than I did ten years ago, I’ve carried too many coffins for my age and my joints ache a little bit more each year but I still have gas left in the tank. Read More »

Mother and Baby, Elizabeth Nourse

ALAN adds to the ongoing discussion on the death of parents:

The loss of my parents within a span of two years left the worst, most sickening feeling of emptiness I had ever known.  The absence of siblings made it still worse:  There is no one left afterward who shares the memories of a lifetime, who knows exactly what we mean when we talk about memories of our parents.

As to the question When do you get over it?, my reply is:  Don’t even think about it.  You never get over it.

The memories will come at unpredictable moments, may often be intense, and may be prompted by seemingly-small things.

The little tugboat night-light on top of a chest of drawers in an ancient black-and-white snapshot, or the memory of Perry Como singing the four words “Dream along with me…” at the opening of his Saturday night television program are instant reminders to me of the warmth and security my mother provided in my boyhood home in the early 1950s.

She left a collection of three thousand color slides from the years 1955-’69.  They are at once a priceless possession and a painful reminder of the loss of the most important person in my life.

When I remember some act of stupidity or misbehavior on my part as a boy or teenager, I can feel exactly how I know my mother must have felt at those moments, an awareness that youth or stupidity denied to me in those years.

To live with a vault of memories that we shared only with our parents—and now to have no one among us who can understand precisely what we mean when we talk of that person or those people or that setting or that occasion from years ago—is quite a challenge.  And never is that challenge greater for me than at Christmas.  In the only years I care to remember, Christmas Eve was always the most joyous day of the year, not because of toys or games or gifts, but because of the setting:  A houseful of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and conversations and laughter and warmth and good cheer—and my mother at the center of it all.  In their place today are only silence, emptiness, and memories in the head of a late-life orphan.  It is that “empty space in life” that Lydia Sherman describes, and I share with her the regrets of not having remained in closer contact with all the older generation and not having talked with them at far greater length than I did. Read More »

“Any secular power that is not Christian necessarily means a theocracy, or rule, of evil. Christians may endure such a rule, but if they promote it, they are betraying their fellow-men, just as a maker of idols is an accomplice to idolatry.” — Louis Veuillot

See Stephen Heiner’s review of The Liberal Illusion, a mid-19th century work on the centuries-long struggle between Revolution and Revelation by the French author Louis Veuillot.

Francis in Myanmar — Find the Christian from Jorge Bergoglio on Vimeo.

ONCE again we see in reports of his visit to Southeast Asia that Francis says and does things that a pope would never say or do.

This is a good time to consider the “Thesis of Cassiciacum,” which resolves the main stumbling block in coming to the conclusion that Jorge Bergoglio and his Vatican II predecessors are not true popes. They occupied (and occupy), under this thesis, the Apostolic throne materially, but not formally. In other words, their elections were valid but they had, and have, no authority. Under this view, there is no prolonged material break in the line of succession extending from St. Peter.

A Snowy Night, George Sotter; 1939

Each morning in the silence I am struck with how orphaned I am. There is no human parent ahead of me that loves me not for accomplishment but because I belonged to them. Our children and grandchildren cannot ever love us or know us the way our parents did, because they did not watch us grow up.  

*

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

When you posted about the death of your Mother, I made a mental note to write when I had time to do so, thoughtfully.

Both my parents have been gone two years, having died when I entered my 60’s in age. Therefore, I had them for such a long time that the adjustment was not as easy as I had thought it would be. Many people lose their parents at much younger ages.

My parents died within 18 months of each other, in their late 80’s. When my mother went into a retirement place, a friend told her, “It is the end of an era,” and I think it went deeply into her that she would no longer have a kindred soul in my Dad. They had tamed a wilderness together in the 1940’s homesteading era, and she would not find many others to commiserate with that or other things they had seen and experienced.

There are some things people do not tell you regarding grief for parents. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Regarding the painting Breaking Home Ties (discussed here):

You would have to be brain-dead not to be moved by the scene in the painting. I do not like the clumsy inner/outer metaphor, so I will suggest that such paintings do not take us out of ourselves but (to use that metaphor reluctantly) deeper into ourselves. They impel us to realize that what we have known in our lives is repeated in the lives of “others far away at a distant time,” as depicted expertly in this painting. It is a reminder of how much we have in common with those others, and they with us.

The family seated and standing around a table, the mantel, the cabinet, the coffee cups on the table, the mother’s apron, the boy now taller than her, the orderliness of the home—all those features were there in my own life. In the painting, they are acute and painful reminders of what once was but is no more, of a family’s integrity, of gladness and sadness, of loyalty and loss. They are, as you say, the most important things in life.

My grandmother seated at a table in 1956 with Homer Laughlin coffee cups, the uncles standing and talking in the background at so many family getherings, the mantel-place upon which rested my mother’s Christmas candles and figurines, the sadness in the act of parting, sometimes spoken but often left unspoken, a snapshot from 1970 in which I had become taller than my mother—I see all these things in that painting. Such paintings add to our knowledge and appreciation of what we have or once had.

GARRISON KEILLOR IS the latest celebrity accused of sexual misconduct. It wouldn’t be surprising if the accusations of crude behavior were true, given his personal history, but what is astonishing is that his career is publicly tarnished with no due process. [Notice how the stories include few details, as opposed to the many details about Harvey Weinstein.]

What happened to presumed innocence? Brendan O’Neill writes:

Of course we all have our private thoughts on the guilt or otherwise of the accused. But when tens of thousands of these thoughts come together in a mass public verdict, we behave like a mob. And we have a direct effect on the exercise of the presumption of innocence in a legal setting. How is it possible to guarantee a fair trial for any of the accused now that Twitter-echoed whisper campaigns have pronounced their guilt? Good luck finding a cool-headed jury for this stuff.

Maybe every man accused of sexual misconduct is, in fact, guilty. But what if a few did nothing wrong? What if just one man is innocent? If one day you’re accused, my guess is you’d rather like it if I gave you the benefit of the doubt. Read More »

FROM The Anti-New York Times:

We caution our readers against excessive optimism as well as believing, at face value, so many of the unsubstantiated claims now floating about the Internet. Nevertheless, Trump’s chumminess with US military leaders, Putin of Russia & Xi of China, his war on State and “Deep State” holdovers, his cutoff of arms to the CIA / Mossad “ISIS” proxy army, Robert Mueller’s sudden investigation of the Podesta Brothers, the appointment of the first non-Jew to head the Federal Reserve in 30 years, that weird and deadly crash just over Rothschild’s castle in England, an unusually high number of sealed indictments registered in Federal courts, the Left’s sudden abandonment of the Clintons, Obongo’s very odd sudden silence, the outing of one Leftist pervert celebrity, journalist or politician after another after another etc, the sudden political troubles of super-Globalist Angela Merkel (here), and those mysterious boots on Killary and McCain’s ankles (to hide GPS bracelets?) all serve to make this idea of a coming anti-Globalist “purge” a viable hypothesis.

Stay tuned!

Source

And another quote: Read More »

KR writes from Belgium:

I am often a bit surprised by the vehemence you have in attacking the New Order Church. I am sure that some of its members are perfectly good people with good intentions, born in the “wrong ” age.

I do however share some of your concern, especially as I have just now discovered that here in Belgium, the salary of my diocese’s priest is fully covered by the state. It shocked me a bit, especially knowing that Belgium is supposed to be a laic state. But, on the other hand, I now understand why the preaching is so bland in all the churches here. They never mention sin or put forward any Catholic moral teaching. Have you ever considered that, at least in Europe, interference from the state could be a factor in preventing the Church to fulfill its mission? Read More »

THE Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ choral work “Only in Sleep,” based on a poem by Sara Teasdale, may bring to mind the friends who live in your heart as children forever.

It may also reassure you that somewhere in the world, music is still music. This is performed by the Choir of Trinity College in its Anglican chapel at Cambridge.

ONLY IN SLEEP

Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.

Only in sleep Time is forgotten –
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.

The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild –
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I too a child?

JEAN-PAUL writes:

I attach a picture I took in Le Petit Palais during our annual month in Paris. The young girl is, like many of the young Parisiennes, beautifully dressed, a child really, not an adult slob tourist as in your post yesterday.

I also attach a photo (below) of the street in front of our place in Paris.

My mother had a stroke last Christmas and is now paralyzed on the right side. Her mind is still clear but she must live in a wheelchair at a long-term care facility 3 minutes away from us and from her home of 67 years.

She moved into the house when she was a 25-year-old war bride, she was 92 this week. I’m 73, almost as old as her.

We must sell the house as she’ll never live there again and we are beginning to clear out 67 years of her things, her treasures. She was a homemaker and loved her home, it was her life.

Five lives were lived there. Every object, every room, filled with memories.

An interesting experience, not easy, as you must know.

THE CULT OF MAN, which is the modern religion really, says that whatever a person desires, provided it does not physically injure someone else, must be good. This belief system is intensely boorish. People routinely put their feet up on chairs in public places today and engage in behavior that once was reserved for the privacy of one’s home.

Here is a man we saw in the art museum the other day. He is not looking at the pictures. The world is his castle.

IT’S A CLICHÉ but it is true. A picture — especially a good painting — says as much as a thousand words and even more, it may say things that words cannot.

I was thinking about this the other day when looking at this touching painting, Breaking Home Ties, by the American artist Thomas Hovenden (1840-1895). From the description by the Philadelphia Museum of Art:

Voted the most popular painting at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Breaking Home Ties captured the American imagination as few other pictures have. The 1890s saw the decline of small family farms and the necessity of young sons leaving the land to make a living in the city or on what little was left of the frontier. The scene Thomas Hovenden depicts here had been enacted in many homes, and the composition gave American families a visual record of their own turmoil. The artist used models he knew well: each figure can be identified as a relative or friend of the Hovendens, including the family dog.

The sadness of the boy’s departure is movingly conveyed with the gloomy background and the mother’s affection and the dog whose eyes are fixed on what is probably one of his best companions. The men move around in the background as if it is too much to watch and the grandmother is stony. The boy looks off in the distance with apprehension and determination. In such a tiny space, the painter captures the drama of his thoughts so that we may feel as if we are experiencing them too. We are taken out of ourselves and into the world of others far away at a distant time.

Photographs, except those by accomplished artists, cannot convey what a painter can. A painter does not deal in physical reality alone, but in inner realities. The best painters communicate ideals — the only things worth living for. Here the ideal is family intimacy. The fact that it is being broken is cause for great somberness.

THE CATHOLIC GENTLEMAN has good advice for how to beat the temptation to view pornography, which is everywhere and available like never before in human history.

A GOOD piece by Patrick Buchanan on the U.S-supported Saudi blockade of Yemen:

Almost 90 percent of Yemen’s food, fuel and medicine is imported, and these imports are being cut off. The largest cities under Houthi control, the port of Hodaida and Sanaa, the capital, have lost access to drinking water because the fuel needed to purify the water is not there.

Thousands have died of cholera. Hundreds of thousands are at risk. Children are in danger from a diphtheria epidemic. Critical drugs and medicines have stopped coming in, a death sentence for diabetics and cancer patients.

If airfields and ports under Houthi control are not allowed to open and the necessities of life and humanitarian aid are not allowed to flow in, the Yemenis face famine and starvation.