THE foolish and narcissistic practice of ripping African children from their cultural context to serve as badges of political enlightenment for Hollywood’s elite finds its latest expression in the actress Charlize Theron, pictured here in the obligatory fitness attire with her rent-a-son Jackson, who is two years old and whom she is already having trouble controlling in public. Imagine her living with him ten years from now when he is a hulking teenager and she is on the latest of her glamorous boyfriends, far too old to have children or a family of her own. This is the maternal equivalent of speeding down a mountain highway in a fancy sports car, careening around the bends with eyes closed. We won’t see the photos years from now of the spectacular crash. This is reckless sentimentality that is, at its core, heartless.

FROM a fascinating working paper written in 1999 by John R. Lott, Jr. and Larry Kenny of the University of Chicago Law School, who examined in detail the effects of women’s suffrage:

THE Republicans can only win a presidential race by becoming more and more like the Democrats, while somehow signaling through image-making to their traditional supporters that they are really not like the Democrats. That is the obvious conclusion to be drawn from recent history, including the 2014 midterm elections. The recent GOP triumph was largely due to lower voter turnout among the young. See Selwyn Duke’s analysis at The American Thinker.

SOPHIA writes:

ACCORDING to The Washington Post:

Christmas and Easter have been stricken from next year’s school calendar in Montgomery County. So have Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

Montgomery’s Board of Education voted 7 to 1 Tuesday to eliminate references to all religious holidays on the published calendar for 2015-2016, a decision that followed a request from Muslim community leaders to give equal billing to the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha.

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Weeping Woman with Handkerchief, Picasso; 1937

IT’S interesting that feminists have so often condemned the art traditions of the West for their supposed exclusion of women artists of genius even though those traditions produced millions of enchantingly beautiful realistic portraits of women, filled with character and depth. Do feminists in academia or the art world express any revulsion for the depiction of women by modern artists even when it dehumanizes them? I am not aware of any.

As E. Michael Jones writes in Degenerate Moderns, perhaps with a touch of overstatement:

“Picasso’s mutilations of the female body bespeak the modern version of human sacrifice; they presage simultaneously in a visual way the concentration camp, the abortion clinic, and the pornographic film, and may well have helped pave the way for all three.”

In his private life, Picasso frequently became infatuated and then disgusted with the objects of his infatuation, such as the photographer Dora Maar, who was the subject of, “Weeping Woman,” above. In addition to his Cubist portraits, he created realistic images of the women discarded, such as the pencil drawing below of Maar, but these are not the pictures for which he is most famous. It’s not surprising that Picasso’s pictures of spliced and hacked female faces were acclaimed and found an enthralled audience given the simultaneous rise of feminine self-loathing.

AN ITALIAN CATHOLIC has posted a petition online, addressed to the “Cardinals of the Roman Church,” requesting the removal of the phony-baloney Marxist “Pope Francis” from the papacy. The elegantly-worded petition states:

[I]t remains a theological truth of the divine law and ecclesiology, that no one who seeks to harm the Church in anything essential, such as Her fidelity to Christ’s Magisterium, can be in communion with Her … 

Any such act by the Modernist cardinals to depose Francis is extremely unlikely (and the Cardinals do not have the authority to depose a pope.) In the meantime, Jorge Bergoglio is not, by virtue of his defection from the Faith, the pope. He is an impostor, who continues his revolutionary agenda at a breathtaking pace, with his wacky homilies denying the existence of God and extolling evolution and dictatorial decrees against Catholics such as the excommunication of anyone who receives sacraments from the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X. As a commenter at one blog put it, “all the kooks and idiots are crawling out of the woodwork to jump into the lap of this pope.” Here’s one example.

ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:

Asians still vote overwhelmingly Democratic in U.S. elections, flawed exit polls aside. See The Washington Post’s analysis of the widely circulated rumor that Asians voted heavily Republican in the recent midterm elections.

THE New York City Fire Department may have found a way to achieve sexual equality.

The solution is to pretend men are women.

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CHRISTOPHER WHITE writes:

A recent essay in The New York Times tells the story of a lesbian couple in Brooklyn who used the sperm of one of their friends in California to conceive their son.

By happenstance, the sperm donor and his wife became pregnant shortly thereafter, and the writer cheerfully claims that it was their Californian friends’ willingness to serve as a donor that brought about good karma in the birth of their own child—or as the title of column states, “It Was in Giving That They Received.”

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ANTHONY ESOLEN writes of “the economics of abortion“:

What is abortion among us but an economic deal? We purchase our hedonism, and our economic latitude, with the blood of the children we do not want. That is it, and with only a few exceptions, it is the whole of it.

TEXANNE writes:

As Mrs. H. points out in your recent post:  “Students have no respect for teachers; teachers have no authority over students, and in fact fear them. “

The same can be said for the feminist dad in your recent post.  He seems to believe that it is somehow manly to allow his child to make the decisions, while his role is simply to support her choices — with force if necessary.

The tragic fact of “feminist fathers” (and teachers as buddies) is that so many of them were raised by fathers who themselves had lost moral authority in their own families — having lost connection with their only source of authority, namely The Father.  It is likely that their parents were loving and dutiful and generous, and as children they were raised “correctly”, according to cultural expectations and with a certain degree of respect for parental authority and elders in general.

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JEWEL A. writes:

The Board of Education building in Cleveland

AT Reclaiming Beauty, Kidist Paulos Asrat has posted fall images of Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

MATTHEW H. writes:

MIKE writes:

Maybe it’s a sign of a deep spiritual deficit, but I’ve never understood the point of view that the idea of a universe created by God is mutually exclusive to the idea of biological evolution. For the people who strictly put their belief in evolution, the theory isn’t and never will be broad enough to rule out a divinely created world or a personally interested God. The people that strictly put their belief in creationism overlook the fact that evolutionary theory has been accurate enough to make useful predictions about the world we live in. I’d be interested to read your thoughts on how and if it’s possible to reconcile the two opposing points of view.

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Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum,
ita desiderat anima mea ad te, Deus.

As a hart longs for the flowing streams,
so longs my soul for thee, O God.

—- Psalm 42: 1