February 10, 2015
DAN R. writes:
In Sunday’s New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni asks, “Do gays unsettle you?” And my answer? Frankly, yes.
I am unsettled, first off, by the very use of the word “gay,” a corruption of a word once universally viewed in a positive light.
February 10, 2015
DEAN ERICSON writes:
An excellent corrective for the idiotic adulation recently accorded Saint Mohandas Ghandi by Obama is Richard Grenier’s article, published in Commentary magazine in 1983, which was inspired by Richard Attenborough’s hagiographic movie on Gandhi released that year. From the piece:
“But it is not widely realized how much violence… was associated with Gandhi’s so called non-violent” movement from the very beginning.”
February 8, 2015
IT’S amazing how much a false president and a false pope can have in common. On February 5th, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Hussein Obama did such a brilliant Jorge Bergoglio imitation that one might suspect that Obama is pitching for the “pope’s” job. Why not? After all, you don’t have to be Catholic to be a papal pretender. In fact, it’s best if you’re not.
In his speech, the president, who also believes all religions are true (and thus no religions are true), said:
So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?
Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Read More »
February 8, 2015
IN THE entry on the former athlete Bruce Jenner, who believes he is a woman in a man’s body when he is, and always will be, a man in a man’s body, the reader James writes:
Don’t get me started on these so-called “sex change” operations. It is disgusting — hack doctors taking these disturbed people’s money in exchange for what is essentially elective genital mutilation. “Sex change” is impossible. It can’t be done. “Oh, I’m a woman/man now” sounds absurd. NO, you aren’t. You are now an “it,” a monster of a person. You are left with a non-functional, ruined genitalia, artificial hormones ravaging your body, and a broken mind that the brainwashed masses will tell you is completely “natural” and “normal.”
February 7, 2015
I RECEIVED a long e-mail from the author E. Michael Jones that was sent to subscribers of his magazine, Culture Wars. In the message, Jones described his recent trip to India. Here is a priceless excerpt:
The juxtaposition of Hindu Temple and Nehru Science center on the Mumbai bus tour was instructive. India has gone from worshipping elephants, monkeys and cobras to worshipping science, with no metaphysical experience in between. It reminds me of what George Bernard Shaw said of America: “a country that went from barbarism to decadence without finding civilization along the way.” India seems destined to become a country of cobra worshipping computer programmers.
February 7, 2015
Ellen Brody, driver of the SUV
THE EDUCATED LAYMAN writes:
The Valhalla, New York train disaster involving the collision of an MTA train and a Mercedes SUV has been receiving a good deal of media attention. All of it, however, is of the judgmentally neutral variety. I live very close to where this occurred and I’ve written about it from a standpoint that I think many traditionalists share, or may at least appreciate. My two posts on this matter can be found here and here. I write:
This is not the case of a mere accident. To call it that without any further explanation strips this event of its moral implications. We do not know Brody’s exact state of mind in her final moments, but we don’t need to. What we know is sufficient to evaluate these events in a moral context. Brody, for whatever reason, was faced with imminent danger but failed to recognize it. This is not surprising, as most middle class whites have never faced imminent danger. Most of us live our lives completely insulated from all threats, natural and man-made, by the institutions of Western civilization. These luxuries certainly make us comfortable, but we have come to take them for granted. We’ve decayed into a people who are utterly incapable of decisive action at critical moments. White, affluent Ellen Brody fastening her seat belt in her Mercedes SUV, blissfully ignorant of the impending catastrophe staring her in the face, is the personification of that decay.
February 7, 2015
DAN R. writes:
Bruce Jenner is the newest poster child for the JokeNation formally known as the United States of America, suggesting that the phenomenon described by the title of Charles Mackay’s 1841 book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, goes beyond the author’s focus on financial panics.
I watched the television coverage of Jenner’s 1976 Olympic decathlon victory. He was the real deal, a great athlete. What happened? Someone who lived off of that success for the past forty years and perhaps needed some new way to distinguish himself from a somewhat sad run of post-gold medal mediocrity? In the end, whenever I think of the idea of Bruce Jenner “becoming a woman” I either shake my head or am tempted to burst out laughing. And I’m reminded of the common-sense truth (transcending the vulgarity) in Gavin McInnes’s banned essay: “Transphobia Is Perfectly Natural.”
February 6, 2015
CHARLOTTE ALLEN reports the latest sordid details in the case of Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia University student who has been carrying around a mattress for months to protest an alleged rape by another student. It all is too disgusting to keep up with, but I offer it to you in case you feel out of the loop when it comes to the campus “rape” war. Sulkowicz, whose case was dismissed by campus authorities and who refused to pursue her charges with the police, was not raped at all, the accused says. She texted love messages to him in the weeks after the alleged incident and had had trysts with him before, which has been known from the beginning. She admits to the messages and the previous involvement. She says her love messages were expressions of rape trauma.
February 5, 2015
DARTMOUTH COLLEGE is an epicenter of white guilt. Ritual sacrifices are routinely made to the Noble Negro in the once proudly WASP milieu. A recent exhibit on civil rights at Dartmouth’s Hood Museum featured an “artwork” that was simply a white sink hanging from a black wall. (Get it — white and black. Profound, eh?) It was a sort of confessional for whites, a place where they could repent and reflect on the horrible day when blacks were killed and tortured en masse —- oops, no, the day when blacks used separate bathrooms.
The problem with ersatz confessionals, aside from the warped concept of sin, is that there is never absolution. It’s no surprise then that a total of 15 professors will be teaching a class this spring on the Ferguson riots. Fifteen professors. The class, titled “#Black Lives Matter,” will surely spark nasty debates, with a few hopelessly taking the side of Darren Wilson and most valiantly taking the side of Michael Brown. Tempers will flare. And that’s just the point. Anything but thought.
The Ivy League is mass intellectual suicide. It’s a Jonestown of the mind.
February 5, 2015
LENT begins early this year, on February 18th. At its best, this season is a great adventure of self-denial and inner participation in the mystical events of the Incarnation. Think about Lent ahead of time. Thomas Droleskey writes:
The penances we are asked to undertake need not be anything extraordinary. That is, a voluntary self-denial of some sort of food that we really like is an act of penance. God knows how much we become attached to sensible pleasures and delights. Read More »
February 5, 2015
“WOMEN’S CULTURES: EQUALITY AND DIFFERENCE,” the conference sponsored by the “Pontifical Council for Culture” and taking place this week in Rome, is more Vassar than Vatican. The outline document is filled with deliberate ambiguities, attempting to appeal to both feminists and non-feminists. It’s a stunning piece of non-Catholic, junk writing. Some of it is unreadable.
An excerpt:
Today, generally speaking, women seek to reconcile professional life and family commitments. They can renounce maternity but those who do have children cannot avoid raising, educating and protecting them. In any case, women who are not married or have no children, welcome, include, and mediate; they are much more capable of tenderness and forgiveness than men. Read More »
February 4, 2015
TIM writes from Brazil:
I am still astonished by the following words written by you: It’s hard for men, a curse really, to choose character over beauty.
It feels as if you had access to my most inner thoughts.
Could you please elaborate on that? What are the roots of this phenomenon? What are the consequences? How to overcome this obstacle?
February 4, 2015
TO the many wonderful readers of this site, I wish to offer these words, a quote from my friend, the great Lawrence Auster:
I am glad to be living through the apocalypse with you.
Thank you.
February 4, 2015
MARIAN T. HORVAT, Ph.D., in this 2003 piece, examines the pervasiveness of black clothing, especially for women:
When did black begin to be considered fashionable wear in the West? It seems to me that we can follow two distinct channels of acceptance. The first upsurge to make black acceptable came from the fashion houses of Paris and London and was directed at the fashion elites – the rich, the glamorous and the chic. Chanel’s revolutionary “little black dress” for the elite lady of style entered the fashion scene in the post war period. Read More »
February 3, 2015
[thermometer width=70 align=center]
J. M. writes in a letter sent with a $250 donation:
I’m sorry for the delay in sending this. Your site is the first one I visit every day. It’s a small oasis of sanity and calm that I have come to appreciate greatly. In fact, it’s often the only site I visit. As such, I am in your debt for the work you do to keep it going.
One other thing prompts my support: apart from the purely intellectual nature of your work, you strike me as a rare and very powerful role model for women. I’m thinking especially of women who have been let down by feminism, or otherwise entertain some doubts about its claims to make them happy and free. I’m sure there are many such women out there who feel this way but are uncertain how to start down another path.
I happen to be one of those who believe that the rift between men and women is at the heart of our spiritual and cultural decline. As such, unless women are restored, there is no possibility of any restoration in the culture.
February 3, 2015
[thermometer width=70 align=center]
A READER writes:
I have just sent a donation for $200 via Paypal in support of your very fine blog.
I earnestly hope that when all is said and done, the site remains in something like its current state of easy public accessibility—didn’t our Lord refer to a light on a hill?
February 2, 2015
IN the latest entry about women who use profanities and believe it’s good, partly because men do it, Sven writes:
Abigail is essentially denying that separate roles apply to men and women, and that good manners are important. In a nutshell, “If it feels good, do it.”
Women have traditionally been keepers of the home. The home is a place of refuge, a place of safety and comfort, separate from a rough, cruel world. Men ventured out to make a living in that world to preserve the home and hearth. How many men throughout history have felt the soreness and care of a long day at a mine or field or mill melt away as they returned to a loving wife and well-kept house? Introducing swearing into a home pollutes it with the roughness of the outside, which is why a man who swears like a pirate captain’s parrot would hang the curses up outside when he came back to his women folk. It didn’t belong in the house, just like his dirty boots. Read More »
February 2, 2015
THANK YOU VERY MUCH to all the readers, new and old, familiar and unfamiliar, who have sent donations and kind letters in response to my fundraising campaign, my first fundraising drive in 14 months. I appreciate your generosity more than I can say and I understand, of course, that some readers simply cannot give anything.
I am nearing the final days of this blitz. As it is, in this final week, I have raised 60 percent of my goal! [Updated figures below.] But …. I have 40 percent more to go. That means if 400 people sent in ten dollars, or two hundred people sent in twenty dollars, or one hundred wonderful, generous, enlightened and courageous people sent in forty whole dollars, I would be done!!! This blog would survive, much to the dismay of those who hate it.
[thermometer width=70 align=center]
In the meantime, dear friends, I must be realistic. I must plan the imminent death of this blog (in its current form).
I assure you this death will be beautiful and dignified. The curtains will be drawn. A caring or at least competent doctor will be in attendance. The time having passed when food is of any use, steadfast friends will gather near the bed. Enemies will shop for fireworks, but in the room itself, not in the world beyond, there will be true grief and little consolation.
It will be perhaps like the death (in the book, not the movies) of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, sinner that she was. Allow me to quote at length, even if it makes some weep and others cheer, “Hurray!” or “Go for it!”