THE relationship between human beings and animals causes a lot of confusion in the modern world.

Do animals have feelings comparable to humans? Do they have souls that live after death? Is it wrong to eat animals or raise them in factory conditions? For an interesting examination of these and other questions, I recommend the website Tradition in Action and its posts here, here, here, here, here, and here. They include heated debate, but Tradition in Action firmly defends the essential inequality of human beings and animals. A piece by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira examines the U.N. Universal Declaration of the Rights of Animals. And in a 2003 post, still timely, Dr. Marian T. Horvat wrote on “eco-terrorism” at a farm where ducks were being raised for foie gras:

The four came by night, guided by the moonlight and fueled by a zeal for their mission. They crept silently to the padlocked door where the hostages were being held at a farm. The bolt-cutters weren’t strong enough for the new padlocks, so the slimmest of the rescuers, a young women, slid in through the air-conditioning system. She opened the door for the three others.

They entered, looked around, and sighed. What a dilemma! One hundred and fifty victims and only four could be freed. But the rescuers, made of stern stuff, faced the tragic option and chose. Then, flight, and success. Four hostages freed!

What am I describing? A special mission of a team of trained forces releasing hostages from some Islamic terrorist holding camp? No, you are reading the description of the “liberation” of four ducks. Yes, four ducks, from the Sonoma Foie Gras farm where they were being fed for commercial purposes. The team was a cell of self-proclaimed “duck freedom fighters,” and the “mission” makes up part of a recent wave of eco-terrorism sweeping across the country.

To be precise, they didn’t quite save all four. One overstressed canard couldn’t muster strength for the escape in the closed bin, its freedom train, and died several hours after the “rescue” at the vet’s. A rescuer sobbed, and the others consoled her: “At least he died here with people who love him and were trying to save him, and not those butchers.” (more…)

  FROM Anthony Esolen's Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child [ISI Books, 2010]: How irresponsible we once were, to allow our children such huge blocks of time to be themselves, outdoors with others of their kind, inventing things to do! Think of the trouble they got themselves into. Sometimes they went fishing. Sometimes they set off firecrackers in garbage cans. Sometimes they hopped trains. Sometimes they hiked through woods and mapped out trails. Sometimes they rode their bicycles to nearby towns. Sometimes they climbed trees. Sometimes they declared war on one another. Sometimes they wandered off to a construction site to look at the backhoes and winches.  Sometimes they formed secret societies with passwords and oaths and penalties of death, or worse. [...] What all children once did on their own, without adults to manage their movements, now relatively  few do, under strict supervision. Parents themselves have taken their cue from the schools, and enlist their young charges in all kinds of drills: for dance or music or gymnastics or martial arts, until the schedule for a typical Tormentarian tot resembles the day's lineup for the executive of a large corporation. You may not, in Tormentaria, look up at the stars at night because you enjoy doing so; but you'll be admired and envied if your parents convey you to an Astronomy course, wherein you will do very little looking at stars and a lot of riding in a…

“I AM most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feelings and propriety. Feminists ought to get a good whipping. Were woman to ‘unsex’ themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings, and would surely perish without male protection.”

—-  Queen Victoria, 1870 (more…)

ERICH W. KORNGOLD, originally from Austria, reportedly wrote his lovely ballet "Der Schneeman," or "The Snowman," at the mere age of 11. Listen to it here. Perhaps your children, close in age to Korngold himself when he composed this, will understand its evocation of the sadly short-lived snow-friend. What a beautiful, dreamy piece this is, as beautiful as a snowy day. Doesn't it make you want to sit by a window and watch as snowflakes -- those magical, many-sided crystals viciously maligned in recent comparisons to the immature and mentally unstable -- fall by the millions to the snow-hungry earth? Don't listen to what they say. There is no comparison -- none -- between a human being with all our faults and a snowflake, which is artistic perfection un-ruined. Same goes with a snowman, whose personality has zero faults and is not subject to Original Sin in the slightest. Except in his capacity to evaporate. As Korngold sweetly shows in musical terms. More on the brilliant and widely forgotten Korngold (1897-1957) from a music blogger: "Korngold is mostly remembered now as a pioneer in film scores. His 1938 soundtrack to The Adventures of Robin Hood won an Academy Award, and he cranked out many more during his time in Hollywood. However, it seems like he got tired of film scores. He stopped writing them in 1946, and returned to composing the romantic style of music he had worked on before leaving Austria.…

HE’S A HERO to many in Israel. Sgt. Elor Azaria, an Israeli army medic, was tried for manslaughter after a video recorded him shooting a Palestinian assailant prone on the ground, already incapacitated by gunshot wounds. Azaria, 19 at the time of the incident, was convicted this month, but many Israelis, including the prime minister, refuse to accept the ruling of the military court and are hailing him as victim or even hero.

The incident occurred on 24 March, 2016 when Abdul-Fatah al-Sharif, aged 21, was shot in the head as he lay injured and unmoving for 11 minutes in the West Bank city of Hebron. Sharif and another man had allegedly lunged with a knife at heavily-armed soldiers guarding a checkpoint, injuring one of the soldiers. Tampering of evidence at the scene was documented in another video.

Azaria was convicted on January 4th. As Jonathan Cook writes:

In truth, however, the popular reaction to the military court’s decision was far more telling than the decision itself.

Only massed ranks of riot police saved the three judges from a lynching by crowds outside. The army top brass have been issued bodyguards. Demands to overrule the court and pardon Azaria are thunderous – and they are being led by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Azaria is no rogue soldier. He is “everyone’s child”, according to much of the public. The unexceptional nature of his act is vouched for by the complete indifference of his colleagues as Azaria pulled the trigger. Polls show overwhelming support – 84 per cent – for Azaria among 18- to 24-years-olds, the age of ­Israel’s conscript army. [emphasis added]

The support for Azaria is by no means uniform. Many Israelis condemn it. But the sort of crime Azaria committed is common in Israel, where it’s acceptable for heavily armed soldiers to gun down even young women and children who approach them suspiciously or throw stones. An estimated 9,454 Palestinians and 1,211 Israelis and have been killed by someone from the other side since 2000, according to statistics compiled by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Both sides have committed atrocities. Fadi Qunbar, a Palestinian Arab, was killed earlier this week “after ramming his truck into a group of Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem, killing four soldiers before he was shot dead. Fadi, a former political prisoner, was from Jabal al-Mokabber, in Jerusalem.”

Both sides have committed atrocities. But the Israeli side is heavily armed and much more often the aggressor. Beginning with the original ethnic cleansing of the region, it has institutionalized barbaric norms that have no equivalent in the civilized world.  (more…)

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Thank you for reposting my little essay about music and landscape among the English composers.

One of the things that saddens me most about the students who pass through my college classroom is their total unawareness of the Western tradition of concert music.  I seek to remedy that whenever possible, principally by building my “Western Heritage” course around a sequence of epic poems and their much later operatic adaptations.  The students are extremely squeamish about the prospect of having to sit through three class-sessions of Claudio Monteverdi’s Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria, but I explain to them that, having read the Odyssey, they now know the story, and can simply relax and let Monteverdi draw them in, as I assure them he will.  He invariably does draw them in, and they admit that their original squeamishness was misplaced. (more…)

IT’S GREAT to see a political dolt and flunky like Meryl Streep put in her place.

Streep attacked Donald Trump at the Golden Globe Awards, criticizing him for his mocking of a disabled reporter. I previously criticized him for this too, but Trump has adequately defended himself, and his critics have repeatedly outdone or matched him in any insensitivity he could have displayed. Trump, greatly to his credit, refused to be bullied by Streep. He wrote on Twitter:

Meryl Streep, one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood, doesn’t know me but attacked last night at the Golden Globes. She is a… Hillary flunky who lost big. For the 100th time, I never “mocked” a disabled reporter (would never do that) but simply showed him.. “groveling” when he totally changed a 16 year old story that he had written in order to make me look bad. Just more very dishonest media!

This kind of response to a Hollywood celebrity is virtually unknown in American politics. See Kellyanne Conway’s terrific response to Streep.

Expect to see much more Hollywood Hysteria. Celebrities have lost some of their power and they know it. Narcissists who are out of touch with the world beyond their careers should have no platform to lecture the public on political affairs. Streep is beautiful and talented, but she is an airhead. (more…)

MICHAEL KRIEGER writes here:

The biggest disappointment regarding Donald Trump since being elected President has been his total embrace of dangerous Wall Street thieves. As it is currently structured and incentivized, the financial services industry represents one of the most destructive and least beneficial forces within the U.S. economy. It is essentially a parasitic industry.

Unfortunately, Trump didn’t merely pick one or two competent finance guys to be in charge of finance-related jobs. Rather, he decided to surround himself with some of the worst of the worst (see links at the end) within an industry that often operates like a criminal syndicate. Treasury Secretary pick Steven Mnuchin is one of these people, and I believe this choice represents the single biggest mistake Trump has made as President-elect. (more…)

     THE GLORY OF THE HOLY FAMILY -- St. Therese of Lisieux I come to sing of the Holy Family, That Divine magnificence that brings me here. In the desert, this sweet brightness glitters, And charms me more than the glory of Heaven… Ah! Who will understand this mystery? Jesus is rejected among His very own. He is wandering, a traveler on the earth, And no one can discern His beauty… But if the great ones disdain Your empire, King of Heaven, Mysterious Star, Long has more than one heart desired You, For You are the hope of all the unhappy. Divine Star, O deep Wisdom, You spread Your ineffable gifts On the little people, the poor of this world, And You inscribe their names in Heaven. If You grant a share of wisdom To the ignorant, to the littlest of hearts, It is because every soul is made in Your image, And You have come to save sinners. A day will come when, on the same meadow, The gentle lamb will graze beside the lion, And the desert, Your only fatherland, More than once will hear Your name.

TRUE PUNDIT reports: Obama "has issued 145 “midnight” regulations with a cost of more than $21 billion since the election of Donald Trump, the most by a lame-duck president in a generation, a study has found."

"His military service as a combat engineer paints a very different image of [Esteban] Santiago than the person who walked into the FBI's Anchorage office in November and demonstrated such "erratic" behavior that agents turned him over to local authorities for a mental health evaluation. Records confirm that Santiago was deployed in Iraq from April 2010 to February 2011. Santiago's aunt, Maria Ruiz, told a New Jersey newspaper that her nephew seemed to be happy after a period in which he acted "strangely" following his return from Iraq." Source

FROM The Babylon Bee: Declaring that he “has to be true to himself,” local man Steve Bakowski announced Friday that he is bravely stepping out and choosing to openly self-identify as a man. “I don’t care what people say. I don’t care what people call me,” an audacious Bakowski told reporters. “I know in my heart that I’m a man. I’ve always known it, ever since I was a kid. I’ve never even second-guessed it. So I’m going to tell it like it is. I’m a man, and I’m not ashamed to say it.” When asked about the possibility of facing backlash for his courageous stance, Bakowski was undeterred.  

  "The three kings with their attendants, prostrate at the feet of the Infant Jesus, were the firstlings of the heathens who acknowledged Jesus, and entered His Church. As we reflect upon the great happiness vouchsafed to them, the question forces itself upon us: "Why do not all nations likewise enjoy a participation in their happiness?" My answer is: "Because they do not look upward with the same love of truth to the star of the Magi;" and this, as I understand it, I will explain today." "The Feast of the Epiphany" by Father Francis Xavier Weninger, 1876

  REFLECTIONS on the often bittersweet musical landscapes of the great English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958), as well as his contemporary Gustav Holst (1874 – 1934), are posted at The Orthosphere. Thomas F. Bertonneau writes: Concerning landscape – and its aesthetic and metaphysical meanings – the philosopher Roger Scruton has written in his study of Beauty (2009) that, “Landscapes… are very far from works of art – they owe their appeal not to symmetry, unity and form, but to an openness, grandeur and world-like expansiveness, in which it is we and not they that are contained.”  In confronting the landscape, then, the percipient subject experiences something like a cosmic moment, understanding his own mortal limitations against the enduring earthly and vegetative environment that affords him a home and yet, being non-sentient, remains alien or at least indifferent to him.  Yet vegetative though it might be, the landscape can stand as metaphor for something else sublime and, with respect to man, entirely prior and creative – namely the divine.

THE WISE MEN

— G.K. Chesterton

Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.

Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,

And we know all things but the truth.
We have gone round and round the hill
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,

And served the mad gods, naming still
The furies the Eumenides.
The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,

The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.
Go humbly…it has hailed and snowed… (more…)

  THEY think you are. See commentary by Christopher Bollyn, author of Solving 9/11: the Deception that Changed the World, in the last 15 minutes or so of this video. His comments about fear at the very end are especially important. Don't be afraid! All decent people -- Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim -- should join together and take his message seriously.

  In medieval and Tudor England, "Twelfth Night, the evening before Epiphany (January 6 - when the biblical kings reached the newborn Christ Child), was a final frenzy of Christmas feasting, drinking and raucous merry making before the community returned to its daily working grind for the rest of the winter. .... At the beginning of the Twelfth Night festival, a cake that contained a bean and perhaps a pea was eaten. The male who found the bean would rule the feast as a king. Midnight signaled the end of his rule, and the world would return to normal. The common theme was that the normal order of things was reversed. This Lord of Misrule tradition dates back to pre-Christian European festivals such as the Celtic festival of Samhain & the Ancient Roman festival of Saturnalia." Read more at It's About Time.

THE Washington Post reports: Drinking is killing twice as many middle-aged white women as it did 18 years ago. Generally, middle age (age 35 to 54)  is not the time to die in modern societies. It is past teenage dangers, before the serious perils of age, and improved medical care and public-health campaigns are keeping more people alive. So why are middle-aged white women dying more often even while death rates for other groups continue to go down? What are white women doing that is so different? [Why death rates for white women in rural America are spiking] One simple answer is: a lot more drinking.