L.R., a female reader, writes:

Regarding the story about the nine-year-old girl who accidentally shot an instructor at a Las Vegas shooting range: Not only is it stupid to send children to have fun and practice with guns at those “theme shooting parks” that are supposed to be available for adults (specially for men only!), but it is also even more stupid to send a girl to try to practice such a thing since in reality women are much worse shooters than men!

I grew up with several scifi movies of women soldiers that seemed to know how to use guns and automatic weapons like in the Aliens movies but women are good in movies because they are fantasy. In reality, women and, even more, female teenagers and little girls are bad shooters and don’t have the same coordination as men when using any kind of guns.

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JAMES P. writes:

Take Beth’s message as a compliment! She is telling you your blog is everything you want it to be!

• Anti-feminist? Yes, good, and purposely so! “Feminism” has been a disaster for women.
• A housewife? Yes, and proud of it!
• Opposed to women in the armed forces? You bet! Women in the armed forces have caused immense harm to women and the armed forces.
• Homophobic? Yes, you oppose this aspect of the Left’s destructive agenda, including the characterization of this opposition as a mental disease (phobia).
• “A step back for all women”? Yes, you are properly questioning the claim that the social changes of the late 20th century actually represented progress for women. After all, if one is going down the wrong path, taking a step back is the right thing to do!

But, I am disappointed that Beth didn’t deploy the crushing accusation of racism, which we all know ends any argument in a complete triumph for the accuser and a decisive defeat for the accused.

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BUCK writes:

Just up the road from me there is going to be a huge celebration this weekend. It’s in Brookeville, Maryland, U.S. Capital for a day, 200 years ago yesterday.

I was aware that the anniversary was approaching and have mentioned it occasionally. Some people had no idea what I was talking about. “When was that? The Revolutionary War?” Even people who have driven north up Georgia Avenue many times, over many years, and who had to stop at the odd ninty-degree turn in the road dead center in town, didn’t know the historical significance. Just very old.

President Madison had to flee the White House from the attacking British. The British are the only “foreign” invaders to burn our White House, along with the U.S. Treasury, the U.S. Capital, the Supreme Court, the Library of Congress and the chambers of the House and Senate. They were gentlemen though; they didn’t burn private residences or otherwise rape and pillage. We burned all of our own ships in the Navy Yard. It’s said that you could see the raging fires from 50 miles away.

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THERE are two striking aspects of this BBC rebroadcast of a 1960 interview with the British writer Evelyn Waugh, which was sent to me by a reader.

First, there is the stunning misrepresentation of the interview by Joan Bakewell, who introduces the rebroadcast with utterly false charges of rudeness and hostility on the part of Waugh, and similar mischaracterization of the writer by John Freeman, the original interviewer, who had posed a number of antagonistic questions to Waugh and accuses him of nervousness that is nowhere to be found. Why do they seem eager to attribute rudeness and even mental instability to the author? Is it their own egotism, their search for a titillating angle, or is there something else at stake?

Secondly, there is the interview itself, which is a memorable and fascinating glimpse of the author, who is open, candid and succinct, his lucid thoughts traveling visibly across a pudgy, Anglo-Saxon face devoid of conceit and concealment. Waugh says there is only one reason why he agreed to be interviewed on TV: poverty. Not many celebrities would admit to the financial self-interest in publicity.

Waugh remembers fondly the instruction his mother gave him before he went to school and being read to as a child, recalls the harshness of life at a British boarding school during World War I and briefly discusses his conversion to Catholicism. I highly recommend the whole thing.

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ALAN writes:

A sampler of today’s mail:

Beth writes:

Your blog is so anti-feminist and totally offensive. Are you a military member? From the prospective [sic] of a lawyer and military wife, you sound not like a person with a valid point, but a jealous housewife with nothing better to do than hate on women in the armed forces. Delete this blog. It makes you look so shallow. You are not only gross, but homophobic. I know a stellar young woman who aced the *MENS PT test for the Marines, is a law school graduate, and is in a long-term relationship with a great guy. She is only a threat to you because she achieves and you blog. In short, you are wrong. You are a step back for all women.

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IF Abraham Lincoln were alive today and publicly expressed today some of the views on race he repeatedly expressed in the nineteenth century, not only would he be unable to win elective office anywhere in the land, even in the smallest of municipalities, he would almost certainly be unable to secure a job in corporations, law firms or academia. Maybe he could live in a log cabin and hunt for squirrels.

In his speech on June 26, 1857 in Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln said, referring to intermarriage between blacks and whites:

A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation; but as immediate separate  is impossible the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together…. Such separation, if it is ever to be effected at all, must be effect by colonization [of blacks in Africa] … The enterprise is a difficult one; but ‘when there is a will there is a way;’ and what colonization needs most is a hearty will. Will springs from the two elements of moral sense and self-interest. Let us be brought to believe it is morally right, and, at the same time, favorable to, or, at least, not against, our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime, and we shall find a way to do it, however great the task may be. The children of Israel, to such numbers as to include four hundred thousand fighting men, went out of Egyptian bondage in a body.

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READERS may enjoy this 2010 post about Thomas Starr King and his love of the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

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PETER writes:

Is it just me or does this silly craze seem more like a pseudo-religious ablution or ritual initiation into the order of morally neutral do-gooders?  When our senior execs jumped into the frenzy last week, it struck me it that eventually liberal suppression of worship would spontaneously manifest itself, but only through superficial parody.

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  FROM Novus Ordo Watch: While Christian men, women, and children in Iraq are systematically being massacred in the most barbaric ways, such as by being beheaded, buried alive, or torn in half by members of the Islamic “Religion of Peace”, the world’s most beloved Modernist, Jorge Bergoglio (“Pope Francis”), who is supposedly the Supreme Shepherd of the world’s 1 billion Catholics, will be hosting an international-interreligious “Soccer Match for Peace”, to be held on September 1, 2014, in Rome’s Olympic Stadium.

VERMONTERS are very sensitive — and suicidally stupid. See the story at Gates of Vienna about a bacon sign. Here is a quote from the city manager of Winooski:

“The cool part of living in a diverse community is that it’s not always comfortable. It’s a fascinating place with lots of opportunities for conversation. The City has to pay attention to a lot of factors while acting within what we can regulate,” said Katherine “Deac” Decarreau.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

Although the report of Islam’s threats in Norway worry me, they do not surprise me, for more than 20 years the nation of Norway, mainly under the tutelage of the Socialist Labor Party, has made that nation a welcoming center of Moslem immigration.  The chickens have come home to roost.

Full disclosure: I served as Press Attaché at the U.S. Embassy to Norway from 1984-88, and to this day keep in contact with several of my former Norwegian friends. On a personal level, my grandson and his family live in a suburb of Oslo, and he had informed me how areas now occupied by Muslims in the capital have become “no go zones” for native Norwegians in that city. My reaction to the epidemic of sexual assaults on Norwegian women by mainly Moslem men was included in the late Lawrence Auster’s blog several years ago.

What is unusual in these events is the burning of the Norwegian flag. If anything, to those Norwegians I knew that flag was the sacred embodiment of Norway’s virtue and values, and more than one Norwegian official queried me as to how the U.S. would allow the burning of our flag as a constitutional prerogative.

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ROBERT and Cynthia Gifford have been ordered to pay $10,000 to the State of New York, and $3,000 in damages to a lesbian couple, for having refused to host a same-sex “wedding” ceremony at their home and business, Liberty Ridge Farm, near Albany. The Giffords had offered to host a reception for the couple but an administrative judge for the New York Division of Human Rights determined that the Giffords had indeed violated the human rights of the couple.

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PERHAPS Norway is the place.

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Paul writes:

You are right about the commercialization of children’s sports. I am flummoxed and disgusted when I see ESPN showing little league games and high school football games.

I can only imagine how overinflated I would have been with myself if I would have been interviewed on ESPN.  All I wanted was to play baseball from dawn to dusk and later, which I could do under the lights, the best time to play baseball in my view.  Sure I would have loved the extra attention because of the effect it would have had on my popularity with girls; but that is not why I always played sports.  The key word is play.  Such notoriety does not help a child to become well rounded.  A child needs to develop social skills, which would be retarded by his fair weather friends basking in his glory rather than requiring him to work at lasting friendships.  Although I moved among various groups because of my personality and athleticism, I was lucky to have had good close friends always.  This would not have been possible unless I had tried hard to make and to keep friends.

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AT American Renaissance, Jared Taylor writes about the Michael Brown case:

In Ferguson, African-Americans are acting like Africans rather than Americans. Presumptions of innocence, rules of evidence, and deliberative justice are about as rare on the street as they are south of the Sahara. Africa is notorious for mob justice. Alleged thieves are often beaten to death on the spot. Witch-burning is so common, you can now see it on YouTube. UNICEF reports that more Africans than ever believe in witchcraft.

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YESTERDAY was the 100th anniversary of the death of Pope St. Pius X, the formidable adversary of religious modernism and a man of great wisdom and sanctity. You can find links to all his great encyclicals here. Here is an excerpt from his encyclical E Supremi, On the Restoration of All Things in Christ, of Oct. 4, 1903: 

6. Verily no one of sound mind can doubt the issue of this contest between man and the Most High. Man, abusing his liberty, can violate the right and the majesty of the Creator of the Universe; but the victory will ever be with God — nay, defeat is at hand at the moment when man, under the delusion of his triumph, rises up with most audacity. Of this we are assured in the holy books by God Himself. Unmindful, as it were, of His strength and greatness, He “overlooks the sins of men” (Wisd. xi., 24), but swiftly, after these apparent retreats, “awaked like a mighty man that hath been surfeited with wine” (Ps. Ixxvii., 65), “He shall break the heads of his enemies” (Ps. Ixvii., 22), that all may know “that God is the king of all the earth” (Ib. Ixvi., 8), “that the Gentiles may know themselves to be men’ (Ib. ix., 20).

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AT The Orthosphere, Kristor writes:

On the one hand, you have the ephemeral symptoms of nihilism: tattoos, piercings, sex change operations, and soon no doubt random unmotivated pointless amputations of this or that. On the other, you have askesis, that cuts away everything that is not of the Truth.

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