MATTHEW writes:

If you can spare the time, I would like to ask you a parenting question.

My cousin, B., recently became pregnant. She is not married to the baby’s father. In this day and age, that is unfortunate but not terribly unusual. What is unusual, however, is that B. is 26 years old, not nineteen. She graduated from an Ivy League college and went on to obtain her Ph.D.  She now works in her field (she is a physical therapist) at a retirement home.  The pregnancy was not planned. B. isn’t making an ideologically motivated decision to forgo marriage before motherhood, and she isn’t making a lifestyle statement.  She had been dating her current boyfriend for three to six months when she discovered that she was pregnant. To her credit, she does not want to have an abortion. But she doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with single motherhood either.

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IN 1896, Carrie Lippincott started a seed business in Minneapolis at the age of 33. Notable for its personal and feminine touch, the company grew rapidly and became the world’s largest seed supplier specializing in flowers. According to Barbara Wells Sarudy at Early American Gardens:

In 1891, Carrie Lippincott began calling herself  “The Pioneer Seedswoman of America.”  Unique among seed companies, she specialized in flower seeds, & targeted female clientele.  Her greatest contribution to the seed trade industry was her gift for marketing. In the 1880’s, most seed packets from most seedhouses looked the same. The packets were printed on medium bond manilla paper with the text in black ink, perhaps with a little color on the vegetable or flower illustration. The farm-oriented catalogs appeared with big 8×10 illustrations featuring fruits & vegetables on their covers & in interior illustrations.  Lippencott’s seed catalogs & advertisements revolutionized how garden seeds were sold. Her catalogs featured images of children, women & flowers giving her an edge with women customers among her competition.

It’s an interesting story. Sarudy features illustrations of the famous Lippincott seed packets. The blog calls Lippincott, who never married, a feminist. However, there is nothing in the post to suggest she was feminist. (One doesn’t have to be a feminist to be a successful businesswoman.)

HERE is opening day in 1960 at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. Notice the attire of the fans. People don’t dress this well to go to church today.

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IS childhood becoming more like adulthood or is adulthood becoming more like childhood? Let’s just say, they are converging, and it ain’t pretty. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think a child can feel safe in a world run by oversized children who wear T-shirts that say,”It’s about me.”

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HAPPY ACRES writes:

Listening to a giggling NPR announceress interviewing a breathless female freelance about terrorists burying kidnap victims in the desert, together enjoying the make-believe [that] they were intrepid James Bonds but in the tittering voices of a coffee klatsch…

…I had the heretical thought that women don’t belong in public life and we’ve made a monstrous mistake now almost impossible to undo.

JEANETTE V. writes:

Two degenerates with their trophy child.

“Tolerance is a virtue or a vice depending on the situation in which it is exercised. Most certainly we should be tolerant of customs, or ways of life, or opinions that differ from our own provided we believe them to be sincerely followed by men of wisdom and good will. But to be tolerant of evil is either laziness or cowardice.”

— Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason: A Yankee View; New Century Books.

DIANA Furchtgott-Roth writes on the campus sexual assault bill:

Rape is a serious matter. That is why it is unfortunate that a bipartisan group of senators is exaggerating the problem of rape on campus and proposing legislation that encourages academic institutions to throw out due process for the accused.

ADAM writes:

When pregnancy is a paid service and a child is a product, then it’s only natural that if the “product” is delivered with physical imperfections, then the customer will return the “product” to the supplier.

I think it’s unfair that the Australian couple in this story is anonymous thus far. They should be exposed for their callous behavior.

THIS IS getting serious. Even the French are sick of nudity.

THE effective unemployment rate among 18-29 year olds is 15.1 percent and the average college graduate has $30,000 in student debt. The unemployment rate is lower for women than for men.

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THERE IS absolutely nothing wrong with Michelle Obama saying that she has the “blood of Africa” running in her veins. She is proud of her heritage, and that’s normal and good.

But an Italian-American or Anglo-American could not say, “I have the blood of Europe running through my veins,” and still hold any public office or position of prominence. No, he has nothing running in his veins but guilt.

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The elephant in the room is about this big.

IT seems too obvious to say, but the problem of campus sexual assault, so prevalent in the news this week, could be largely prevented without the intervention of the federal government or the police or campus sexual assault investigators and advisors and lawyers. The obvious solution is the elephant in the room that no one acknowledges.

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St Ignatius Loyola (detail); MONTAÑÉS, Juan Martínez

Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

The other things on the face of the earth are created for man to help him in attaining the end for which he is created.

Hence, man is to make use of them in as far as they help him in the attainment of his end, and he must rid himself of them in as far as they prove a hindrance to him.

Therefore, we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things, as far as we are allowed free choice and are not under any prohibition. Consequently, as far as we are concerned, we should not prefer health to sickness, riches to poverty, honor to dishonor, a long life to a short life. The same holds for all other things.

Our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we are created.

FROM The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, translated by Louis Puhl, S.J.

THE Associated Press reported yesterday:

Scores of Baltimore-area religious leaders held an interfaith prayer vigil for unaccompanied children who arrived in Maryland after fleeing violence in their home countries.

Dozens of religious leaders and supporters marched along Baltimore’s Inner Harbor on Wednesday to draw attention to the influx of immigrant children into the United States, and specifically into Maryland and Baltimore. In the first seven months of 2014, 2,205 unaccompanied immigrant children have settled in Maryland. Most of those children have been reunited with family members or placed in the homes of sponsors.

What the story failed to mention is that these “religious leaders” included federal contractors who provide refugee services. Read More »

From the 1951 movie Angels in the Outfield

ALAN writes:

For your readers who enjoy movies from pre-Revolutionary times (i.e., before the 1960s), I would like to recommend one made by MGM in 1951. Angels in the Outfield is a black-and-white movie about the manager of a baseball team and an orphan. It is not primarily about baseball but about good and evil, self-control and its absence. It is not a great movie. It does not pretend to be. But it is charming and thoroughly satisfying to anyone who remembers American culture and baseball in the 1950s.

The story involves the influence of the orphan and a newspaper reporter on the manager and his bad habits.  It features excellent performances by Paul Douglas as the manager, Janet Leigh as the reporter, Donna Corcoran as the eight-year-old orphan, and Keenan Wynn as an obnoxious sports announcer.  Bing Crosby, Joe DiMaggio, Ty Cobb, and songwriter Harry Ruby appear as themselves in brief scenes.

The movie is a time capsule from 1951. There is no “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” There are no “messages.” There is a degree of orderliness in the behavior of the people in this movie that was common in 1951 and for some years after but would be astonishing to see in any public place today.  Shakespeare is quoted on a baseball field.  We get to see streetcars and scenes on the streets of Pittsburgh, where parts of the movie were filmed.  Baseball teams traveled by train, and one scene takes place in a dining car.

Inside a Catholic orphanage we see immaculate rooms, hallways, wooden staircases, and the quiet dignity that Catholic nuns enforced.  All those scenes are true to life:  That moral code and orderliness were always there in the red-brick parochial school building I attended in the 1950s and in other such places.

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This photo of Kassim Alhimidi, weeping over his wife’s body, appeared with the Times’s initial story on the murder of Shaima Alawadi. None of the subsequent stories featured a photo of him under arrest or in court.

HERE is a classic case of twisted reporting to make white Americans appear to be hateful, racist, bigots who have not been welcoming to the people of the world even though they have accepted, and been friendly to, nonwhite foreign immigrants everywhere.

In March, 2012, Shaima Alawadi was murdered in suburban El Cajon, California. Shortly before she was killed, according to her relatives, a note was found taped to the family’s front door that said: “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist.” A similar note was found next to the Iraqi Muslim woman’s body when she was discovered stabbed to death on her kitchen floor. The New York Times promptly ran a long piece on the murder that appeared on March 27, 2012 in the A-section of the newspaper. Two reporters worked on the story. Ian Lovett and Will Carless wrote:

Whatever the police eventually determine, the crime has shattered the sense of security for Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, exposing cultural tensions and distrust that have often simmered just below the surface since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001.

Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that many Muslim women in the area were worried that Ms. Alawadi had been targeted because she wore a headscarf in public, as many observant Muslim women do.

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TOO soft to stand by and resist kidnappers, European diplomats have caused the Al Qaeda kidnapping business to explode. Rukmini Callimachi writes in The New York Times:

While European governments deny paying ransoms, an investigation by The New York Times found that Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just last year.

In news releases and statements, the United States Treasury Department has cited ransom amounts that, taken together, put the total at around $165 million over the same period.