MRS. T. writes:

I found your posts on chopping and processed food very interesting. I certainly believe the decline of health goes hand in hand with the modern American diet.

This particular quote from Dr. Alexis Carrel struck me: “Although modern hygiene has considerably prolonged the average length of life, it is very far from having done away with diseases. It has simply changed their nature .. The organism has become more susceptible to degenerative diseases … The ordinary staple foods do not contain the same nutritive substances as in former times.” I look at my dear mother-in-law, who lives with us, as a prime example.

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IN AN interview at Lifesitenews, Robin Teresa Beck talks about her former life as a lesbian:

Women are emotional, that’s our strong point, and when you put two women together in intimacy, you’ve got drama all over the place. It’s like a soap opera on steroids. That’s something that most women in a Lesbian relationship will not tell you. You know, God made men more sexually driven, and women are just more emotionally driven. And that’s the beauty of men and women coming together in partnership: Somehow, it balances out. Men and women balance each other out. But when you put men together sexually, you get guys who become unsatisfied and always looking for something more. That’s why some gay men go through a hundred relationships, some even a thousand. It’s similar when two women become sexual together: There is nothing but emotion, turmoil, and all kinds of upheaval.

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ONE OF the relatively recent innovations in supermarkets is pre-chopped and pre-peeled and pre-washed vegetables. Our supermarkets don’t have the room for produce from local farmers, but they do have the room for hundreds of packaged “fresh” vegetables and fruits that are all ready to cook or eat without any prep work. They even have pre-sliced onions and brussels sprouts. I realize these chopped vegetables are a great convenience for certain segments of the population, such as old people who live by themselves, but is it possible that so many people don’t have the time to wash their own carrots? This phenomenon, it seems, is related not just to materialism and the economic pressures on families that are inevitable in a materialistic society, which leaves no one with the time to chop, but to the general aversion to manual labor. I once met a woman who said she does not chop any vegetables at all. That would be fine if she were wealthy and had servants to do it or could take her family to a decent restaurant every night or lived in a major city where she could order great take-out prepared by immigrants who do all the chopping. But she actually was a middle class mother in the suburbs. How can you raise a family and not chop onions? That’s like being a violinist and refusing to touch a bow.

A people that cannot chop is rootless. It’s like a country without farmers, deprived of connection to the earth. As it is, most of the fruits and vegetables in the stores resemble plastic play food in doll houses. Vegetables come from dirt, not from factories!! Do people realize that? In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve probably enjoyed breaking open and sectioning the abundant fruits of the earth. It was play to them to revel in the splendiferous colors and shapes. Every onion is a masterpiece. In our fallen world, chopping is not always play. It truly is tedious, but it’s a tedium that becomes us and improves us.

Pre-handled vegetables are not as healthy. The outer layer of the carrot protects it from drying out and leaching nutrients. I have seen this process close up. When lettuce is broken up and put in a plastic bag, it also, I am convinced, loses nutritional value. I am not a scientist and can’t prove any of this, but it’s just so obvious from the plastic taste of these processed vegetables, which are so lacking in the personality of real food. Nutrition is connected to the spiritual needs of man, so much so that all the dietitians in the world can’t put their fingers on the key to health. It is to be found in the intimate and sacred relationship between the human and the material.

There is perhaps another reason for the decline of chopping. At the cutting board, one is sometimes alone with one’s own thoughts. Some people in our vain, heavily mediated and distracted world, perhaps through no fault of their own, have no thoughts at all. They only have sensations and emotions. Thus they discover at the cutting board that there’s no there there. For these people, much to be pitied, chopping would be therapeutic. Doctors should perhaps send some of the depressed home with prescriptions to chop so many onions and cabbages a day.

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  RON writes: I thought you might be interested in this article about organ donations from Women’s E-News. Much of the article makes sense in terms of helping to facilitate an increase in the number of organ donations from healthy donors. The weird thing is the “women as victims” overlay that seems to be a requirement for any article published by this outlet and many others. It almost looks like a pre-existing, gender neutral article had a “women as victims” front end grafted onto it.  Note how it is all “women as victims” up to the sub-heading “Hidden Costs Pile Up,” after which gender is never mentioned again. The overwhelming (and still growing) tendency to force everything through a “women as victims” gender “lens” is something that needs a good dose of ridicule. There are so many stories that sound like the famous joke headline, "World Ends Tomorrow: Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.”

I HAVE another serious tooth infection, which is why I have not been posting much. The results have made me wonder how much refined sugar and other processed foods have contributed to my dental problems over the years. Perhaps if I could view myself as a victim, I might feel better. I happened to come across this relevant quote today in the little book, The Church and Farming by the Rev. Denis Fahey. The passage is by the French scientist Dr. Alexis Carrel from his Man, the Unknown. 

Modern Man is delicate …Medicine is far from having decreased human sufferings as much as is generally believed. It is true that the number of deaths from infectious diseases has diminished, but the deaths from degenerative diseases have increased, and the sicknesses consequent on these diseases are longer and more painful. The years of life which we have gained by the suppression of diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid fever, etc., are paid for by the long suffering and lingering deaths caused by chronic affections, and especially by cancer, diabetes, and heart disease … The maladies of the central nervous system are innumerable … Although modern hygiene has considerably prolonged the average length of life, it is very far from having done away with diseases. It has simply changed their nature .. The organism has become more susceptible to degenerative diseases … The ordinary staple foods do not contain the same nutritive substances as in former times. Mass production and commercial processing have modified the composition of wheat, eggs, milk, fruit and butter, although these articles have retained their familiar appearance … Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis of diseases. Their studies of the modes of life and of nourishment on the physiological, intellectual and moral state of modern men are superficial, incomplete and of too short duration.

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  PUNK ROCK celebrity Patti Smith, the not-remotely-Catholic poet and singer famous for her song line "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," will perform at the Vatican Christmas concert in December. Smith is said to have been personally invited by the Argentine Bomber (aka Pope Francis) himself. It is an apt choice, in a perverse way. The "pope" and punk rocker share the same Marxist sensibility. Here is Smith's Communist anthem, "Power to the People." It about sums up Bergoglian theology: The people rule, not God.  

IN the last ten years, the Ford Foundation has given $80 million to immigrant rights groups such as La Raza (in English The Race.) Ford is one of several major foundations that are essentially invisible rulers on the immigration issue, funding the cultural transformation of America whether the people want it or not. “Foundations are a peculiarly American institution,” wrote Joel L. Fleishman in his book The Foundation: The Great American Secret. “They have been the dynamo of social change since the beginning of last century. Yet they are cloaked in secrecy — their decision making and operations are inscrutable to the point of obscurity, leaving them substantially unaccountable.”

This is Ford’s statement of purpose on the immigration issue. As you can see, it bears little relation to reality: (more…)

  THIS parsnip and apple soup, which I recently made for my older son and a beautiful young woman he brought for dinner, would be a good first course for Thanksgiving dinner: You can, of course, do whatever you want for Thanksgiving. I don't mean to be controlling or anything (as mothers so often are). But this is a delicious possibility. Just remember to core the parsnips.

  RACIST Italian xenophobes in a Roman suburb object to the transformation of their neighborhood by an influx of Egyptians and Bangladeshis, presumably mostly Muslim, with refugee status. More than 140,000 refugees and asylum seekers have come to Italy this year alone. Many of the "refugees" paid smugglers to help them cross the Mediterranean and some were pulled from the waters by the Italian navy, as part of its rescue operation Mare Nostrum. About 3,000 migrants have died in the crossings. For more details, see this article at The Irish Times and the many posts at Refugee Resettlement Watch. In August, refugees rioted in Northern Italy, claiming they were being fed too much pasta.

AN Asian reader writes:

I feel a sense of helpless dread after reading that five million illegals are going to be given legal status next week at the stroke of a pen. I am a new citizen who did everything correctly.

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  JEANETTE V. writes: Common sense is uncommon these days. The progressives worship their idol "science" which in reality is no longer science but vile and evil propaganda that is anti-science.

  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: I've wanted to send you a news story that I only saw reported at Life Site News and Natural News and certainly not in the mainstream media. Catholic doctors in Kenya reported that six samples of a tetanus vaccine being given to up to 2.3 million women in Kenya were found to be spiked with a chemical that induces abortion for up to three years. The latter source makes it out to be race-based genocide, but I think that's a stretch; population control is obviously not. These vaccines are being pushed by the UN and the World Health Organization.

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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  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.