BRITTANY MAYNARD is the latest poster child for the pro-suicide movement. Diagnosed with brain cancer not long ago, Maynard, 29, has decided she will kill herself on November 1 to avoid acute suffering. Compassion and Choices, the former Hemlock Society and a leading advocate of laws legalizing assisted suicide, has produced an artful video of Brittany that has gone viral with more than five million views. I was visiting a relative in a nursing home the other day, surrounded by the sick and disabled, when I heard on a nearby screen this self-absorbed woman being interviewed. The media can’t go wrong with a story like this. It rends emotions and stirs controversy. Organized suicide is great for the news business. I wondered how many people in how many nursing homes and hospitals around the country were watching this willful, painfully superficial woman explain how pointless suffering is.

Maynard believes she is entitled to a life of health and adventure. Deprived of that, she has chosen to plan her own suicide, and, while she is at it, promote the idea for others. Some who also have terminal illnesses, understandably agitated by her story, have begged her to reconsider. Little do they know they are playing the part of useful fools to the propaganda machine at “Compassion and Choices.”

Dave Andrusko writes:

Maynard’s case is what groups like Compassion & Choices live for. A beautiful young woman apparently about to be cut down in the prime of her life. It matters not that such cases—terminal illnesses—are always the opening wedge after which, once the principal is established, the “right” to be “assisted” expands to a whole panoply of reasons none of which are about terminal illnesses.

The principles of Compassion and Choices are perfectly consistent with assisted suicide for those who are not terminally ill but are experiencing unhappiness and chronic illness of some kind. Legal suicide, much farther ahead in Europe, has already gone in that direction in Belgium, and it will likely go in that direction in the United States too.

The ironic thing about Maynard’s case is that the art and science of relieving pain are highly developed and she apparently has family and friends willing to care for her. But she sees no point in living a little longer unless she can have it her way. She is planning to continue to travel and have fun after her death too. Sadly, it seems to never have occurred to Maynard that she may experience intense suffering after her death.

Read More »

MICROSOFT CEO Satya Nadella is a clueless man. He had the naiveté to suggest to a gathering of women in computing that hard work matters most in connection with earnings.

It’s not really about asking for the raise,” Nadella said, “but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” according to a transcript of the event provided by Microsoft.

In the long term, Mr. Nadella said, good workers will be rewarded and recognized for their efforts.

This is offensive to The Powers That Be, and Nadella was quickly beat up on social media. His statement implies that women are not victims — whether of male prejudice or of what Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In fame says is their own failure to ask for more money. Fortunately, Nadella has apologized and gotten back on script by promising to close the pay gap, admitting to male bias against women in a typical expression of opportunistic male self-hatred.

By the way, readers have probably often seen the figures on how little women make relative to men. Statistics on how much of total family income men provide are rarely reported. Among married fathers, men still make about 65 percent of household income and spend more than 50 percent more hours in paid employment than married mothers. Men don’t have the choice, as women so often do, to take lesser paying work or part-time jobs.

The pay gap is another one of those issues in which there is open deception. Male deference used to entail defending and protecting women. Now it demands coddling them with lies.

Read More »

CLAIRE writes:

I just became aware today that Jorge Bergoglio has had a new book published, The Joy of the Gospel. I did a brief Google search of images of all of his book covers and the book covers of previous popes, and my suspicions seemed to be confirmed. No other pope has ever put his smiling visage on the cover more than Bergoglio. And even if other they did, there was always a sense of gravity to the picture. Not so with Francis. His face reminds me of another book’s cover that was recently published. As a matter of fact, the authors are practically interchangeable. Behold, the Osteen:

MRS. Sunshine Thiry writes:

I thought I should alert you that October is National Pizza Month. We industrious housewives strive to make dinners enjoyable and fun, so I am sure your readers will want to try out some of the pizza products and recipes you have highlighted over the years; my personal favorite was the Thanksgiving Pizza Stuffing.

But it can be difficult to find new and innovative ways of serving pizza, so I am including a photo of a pizza dish which I am sure we are all eager to try – Pizza Fondue!

FROM Kevin Williamson at National Review:

Home-schooling isn’t for everybody, but every home-school student, like every firearm in private hands, is a quiet little declaration of independence. It’s no accident that the people who want to seize your guns are also the ones who want to seize your children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s desire to imprison people who hold the wrong views on climate change and Harry Reid’s plot to gut the Bill of Rights are not aberrations in an otherwise genuinely liberal agenda; the Left desires to put every aspect of every human life under political discipline, from which history books your children read to what kind of cheese you eat.

FROM Christ or Chaos:

Pope Leo XIII explained that we must find in the Rosary the sure remedy to the social ills that beset the world. His words are as true now as when they were written in 1893:

5. We deplore — and those who judge of all things merely by the light and according to the standard of nature join with Us in deploring-that society is threatened with a serious danger in the growing contempt of those homely duties and virtues which make up the beauty of humble life. Read More »

St. Pius V

DON VINCENZO writes:

On this day, the Church celebrates the Day of the Rosary, a day of prayer proclaimed in 1571 by the Pope Pius V  after one of the decisive naval battles in history: Lepanto, fought in the Ionian Sea near today’s Greek city of Naupaktos, which adjoins both the Gulfs of Corinth and Patras.

On October 7, 1571, the boy shepherd, Michele Ghislieri, who would become Pope Pius V, recognizing the serious threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean, and the boast of the Sultan Selim II that he “would stable his horses in St. Peter’s,” single handedly organized the Holy League, receiving no help from Germany, France or England, in which the naval forces of the Holy See, Venice and Spain were deployed against the much larger Turkish fleet. The pope attributed that victory by an outnumbered fleet the result of the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the saying of the Rosary; hence, he called that day Our Lady of Victory, which was later changed to the Feast of the Rosary by Pope Clement XIII. Read More »

America’s Quasi-Totalitarian News Media

by Lawrence Auster

It is well known that, when one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

— George Washington, on the pro-Jacobin press of the 1790s

A major force in the demoralizing of America is the electronic news media. Unfortunately, like most conservative complaints about liberalism, the constant right-wing gripes about “media bias” tend to be superficial and ineffective.  Ineffective, because they can be refuted by many trivial examples of the media’s “balanced” treatment of an issue; and superficial, because the problem of liberal media control is far deeper than the term “bias” suggests.  What conservatives call “bias” is not just an unfair tilt in favor of liberals and against conservatives.  Rather, it is the systematic construction of an alienist version of reality, and the suppression of all facts and opinions that contradict it.  This process of mass indoctrination has become so pervasive that no one, even conservatives, clearly sees it as such.

Read More »

THE news was spread far and wide this weekend that three women had passed the Combat Endurance Test required to enter the Marine infantry. What the headlines didn’t highlight was that out of 24 women who have attempted the course, only four have passed.

Apropos of this high failure rate, here is a relevant essay, “Why Women Do Not Belong in the U.S. Infantry,” from a recent issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. Marines Weapons and Training Instructor Capt. Lauren F. Serrano (give this woman a medal!) gets to the heart of the matter in this top paragraph below:

Female Marines who want to stir the pot by joining the infantry ranks are more interested in their careers than the needs of the Corps—they are selfish. 2dLt Sage Santangelo’s recent article in The Washington Post about why women are failing Infantry Officer Course argued that “the Marine Corps needs to set women up to succeed in combat roles.” Why? How will that contribute to a better fighting force, the needs of the Marine Corps, and the success of young enlisted Marines? The time, energy, and conflict associated with setting women up for success in infantry billets will not make the Marine Corps more combat effective.

Read More »

DON VINCENZO writes:

Given my time spent overseas in six different U.S. embassies, my first reaction to Eric Duncan’s arrival in this country and subsequent hospitalization with Ebola was to raise this question: how did this man ever get a visa to travel here legally in the first place? For openers, by any and all standards, giving him a visa was a near certainty that another immigrant would remain here permanently.

There were several telltale signs that would have, at least in my years in embassies, prevented any consular officer, a role that I did not generally have unless assigned to do so over a weekend or an emergency, from issuing that visa, amongst them that Duncan was single and basically unemployed, had lived in Ghana, which demonstrated a tenuous connection to Liberia, and had family in the U.S. It should also be noted that Liberia has one of the world’s highest levels of visa overstays, another strike against him. And, of course, there is the question of the Ebola presence in that region, which should make all of the other issues moot. Read More »

A NEW symbol of the Vatican II Church.

FRENCH police estimate 80,000 people marched in Paris yesterday — organizers say there were half a million — at the latest Manif Pour Tous pro-family march against artificial reproduction, surrogacy and same-sex “marriage.” Demonstrations were held in other cities as well; 30,000 people were estimated to be on the streets in Bordeaux. See posts here and here at Galliawatch. There is very little coverage by the American media.

These are exciting events. The shopping carts above are a symbol of the commodification of children. What a perfect and clever image! The French in large numbers grasp the psychological atmosphere of childhood. They know that a child cannot be treated like a piece of merchandise or be deliberately denied a father or mother without suffering irreparable harm.

It is ironic that these marches took place on the day the Family Synod of Bishops opened in Rome.Was there even a tweet from the “pope” in support of the march? It seems not, even though so many of the marchers were expressing a sensus Catholicus in their defense of children and the wholeness of the family. 

Read More »

THE SUPREME COURT has refused to consider rulings by appeals courts in five states, clearing the way for same-sex “marriages” in those states and possibly in six more, which would bring the total to 30. The marriage statutes are null and void as of today in Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Salome with the Head of John the Baptist; Lucas Cranach the Elder

TODAY, when the NewVatican’s Extraordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the Family opens in Rome, revolutionaries who reject (without coming right out and saying it) Catholic teaching on marriage and family will have their heyday at last. The theme of the two-week Synod, which will begin a two-year process, is “the pastoral challenges of the family in the context of evangelization,” which might be rephrased as “the challenges of filling pews when the Protestant church down the road accepts the divorced and the cohabiting and those openly practicing homosexuality and never, ever preaches against contraception even though we don’t preach against it either” or “the pastoral challenges in a world so depopulated by contraception that we are scrambling for bodies.”

Over the course of the next two years, the Synod will soften the minds and consciences of the faithful with extraordinarily ambiguous propaganda and will subject the Church to extraordinary persecution from within — and do it all under extraordinary secrecy. Marco Tostati of La Stampa wrote:

For the first time in its decades-long history a Synod of Bishops will be held mainly behind closed doors. The public could not be present even at the many Synods in the past, but ALL of the reports, from those of the Archbishop of Milan to the last diocese in Patagonia, were published daily, either in detail or in a summary.

Instead at this Synod none of the presentations will be made public.

Yes, the Synod, or Nod-to-Sin, promises to be extraordinary. Read More »

JAMES N. writes:

There is so much to say about this impending catastrophe that it would take a book to say it.

One little point: The epidemic curve is nearly vertical. That is, more cases this week than last; many more next week than this week. Therefore, with a 21-day incubation period, many, many more West Africans are infected and not yet symptomatic than are sick. These are the people who are trying to get out.

Stopping those near death from boarding an aircraft is sensible, but for every one of them, there will be 100 or more who arrive in the U.S. perfectly well, but destined to become infectious while here. Our current policy is absolutely, totally insane, and every time I think it through, my view of it becomes worse.

I believe that one hospital can, with perfect execution, safely care for one patient with Ebola. But the idea that this idealized scenario is scalable to hundreds of hospitals and hundreds of cases is absurd. Any normal country, with the facts available in early August 2014, would have banned arrivals from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Any normal international organization would have closed the airports in Conakry, Monrovia, and Freetown to non-military traffic weeks ago.

What they are doing in this situation is, literally, incomprehensible.

Read More »

BUCK writes:

I have an anecdote that I have never told. I don’t know if it damaged me, but it has always bothered me. My memory of it was prompted by a video of an attractive female reporter, wearing skin-tight black stretch pants, interviewing a male on the street in France on the ongoing immigrant rape culture.

I was thinking about it while driving from my home in Maryland to take care of my 92-year-old mother, who is in a rehab facility in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, since she fell and broke her hip. We were not close. I’ve talked to her more in the last two years than in the previous sixty.

At about age eleven, like any normal boy, I was not the least bit aware of my own mother’s sexuality. It didn’t exist.

My parents had recently begun to fight, and constantly. I was bewildered by it and I had no idea what was going on, why or what was going to happen. I still don’t know much for sure. Neither of them ever explained or have ever even mentioned it. I mean the divorce. Not sure that they could. I never talked about it with my older sister or my older brother, then or ever. Read More »

John Updike

E. MICHAEL JONES in the latest issue of his magazine Culture Wars has a fascinating article on John Updike, whom he sees as the personification of what Christopher Lasch called “the Culture of Narcissism.” Updike reinforces one of Jones’s enduring themes, which is cultural revolution as the rationalization of sexual transgression by Western elites. Jones has argued his thesis over the years by focusing on some of the West’s most famous intellectuals and theorizing about how their sexual transgressions influenced their thinking. Here he delves into the life and work of Updike. The novelist was well known for his adulteries and, according to Jones, these led to the growing perversion of his art and his increasing identification with cultural subversion. As an example of Updike’s cynicism when he was firmly established as one of America’s leading literary stars, Jones offers this quote from Updike’s autobiography:

I read and talked into a microphone and was gracious to the local rich, the English faculty and college president and the students with their clear skins and shining eyes and inviting innocence, like a blank surface one wishes to scribble obscenities on.

According to Jones,

DR. MARIAN HORVAT recently reported on the “Nuns on the Bus,” who have begun another national tour:

Now, top on the list of issues for these sisters are immigration reform, health care, and economic justice, certainly not pro-life or anti-“gay marriage” issues. “Vote people first” – is the motto. That is to say, vote Socialism first, vote Catholic second or not at all. The agenda is pure and simply social justice.

The sisters are all aging with typical short hair cuts, many in the Nuns on the Bus signature blue t-shirts, all in secular dress, in short, the modern “sister.” “Vote people first! Vote people first!” shouted these sisters and folks all gathered together on Day One of Nuns on the Bus. This translates quite simply to “Vote Democratic,” which explains Joe Biden’s presence for the grand kick off.

Read More »