Visit to a Country Doctor, Norman Rockwell

BUCK writes:

When my father was a boy, there wasn’t much in the way of health care, not a tenth of what is available today. Most surgeries were still done in your own home. Antiseptic methods had not yet been well established. There was no income tax, no Medicare, no Medicaid, no Social Security, no health insurance.

A 1919 study revealed that four times more money was lost in wages for missed work than was spent on whatever ailed you. Why would anyone buy health insurance? They didn’t; they bought “sickness” insurance instead, like today’s disability insurance, which arguably is under utilized. They also bought a good bit of burial insurance. These were risks that people could understand and calculate.

In 1940, about 10 million of our 132 million were enrolled in a health insurance plan. By 1948, when I was born, there were almost 60 million enrolled. By 1960, 130 million of our 180 million were enrolled.

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Aja Riggs

BY judicial fiat, New Mexico has become the fifth state in America in which assisted suicide is legal. Aja Riggs, 49, was one of the plaintiffs in a case which successfully overturned the state’s assisted suicide statute. She has advanced uterine cancer. She was backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the well-funded pro-suicide organization Compassion and Choices, an offshoot of the Hemlock Society. Second Judicial Judge Nan Nash ruled earlier this week that under the state constitution, terminally ill citizens have a right to receive help in ending their lives. Once again, the most extreme and inhuman views become institutionalized by a judge. She wrote:

“This court cannot envision a right more fundamental, more private or more integral to the liberty, safety and happiness of a New Mexican than the right of a competent, terminally ill patient to choose aid in dying,” the judge wrote.

Got that? Suicide is “integral” to safety and happiness.

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WHAT can be said about Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent chastising and threatening of Nigeria for its new anti-sodomy laws except that the U.S. Government is a great force for evil in the world. As the blogger Mundabor points out, it’s interesting that Kerry has not publicly condemned Saudi Arabia even though sodomy is a capital offense there. “People everywhere deserve to live in freedom and equality. No one should face violence or discrimination for who they are or who they love,” said Kerry this week. Everyone deserves freedom and equality except those who don’t particularly want to see their relatives and friends pulled into the land of AIDS, drug use, suicide and homosexual promiscuity.

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READ about the latest in the ongoing saga of the Wunderlich family in Germany at Lifesitenews. The Wunderlichs have been forced to send their children to public school and denied legal custody so that they might obtain visas to move. The judge who ruled on an aspect of the case last month called homeschooling a “straitjacket.” Good heavens, what does he think human beings did before modern schools were invented? Most of the European monarchs never went to school.

From the article: Read More »

A protester makes the sign of the “quenelle”

A French black comedian, Dieudonné, has been censored by the government for allegedly inciting anti-Semitism with a crude gesture, now known as the “quenelle,” which some say resembles a “reverse Nazi salute,” a rather far-fetched interpretation of what it appears to mean. His tour was banned as a result, as Galliawatch reports.

Dieudonné has come to symbolize, for a certain segment of the French population roughly between the ages of 20 and 30, the elevation of the Holocaust, or Shoah, to a state religion and the demonization of French patriotism, writes Dian Johnstone:

By placing Auschwitz as the most significant event of recent history, various writers and speakers justify by default the growing power of the European Union as necessary replacement for Europe’s inherently “bad” nations. Never again Auschwitz! Dissolve the nation-states into a technical bureaucracy, free of the emotional influence of citizens who might vote incorrectly. Do you feel French? Or German? You should feel guilty about it – because of Auschwitz. Read More »

From the British Library’s Collection of Illuminated Manuscripts.

SOPHIA writes:

I wrote to you in the past (see here and here) regarding my strong desire to become a housewife. As you know, I’m young, (miserably) in college, and had until recently little hope of meeting someone whom I could marry, i.e., with the same traditionalist views. Of course, similar-minded individuals are not too difficult to find on the Internet; so, to keep things concise, I’m rather convinced we’ve found each other. For about the last half year, I have been in intimate communication with a young man (my age, same year of college) with whom I have striking compatibility. We want the same things: a traditionalist Catholic home, wherein our large number of children are schooled, to live as self-sufficiently as possible. We dream of eventually owning a farm, but looking at things realistically makes that appear to be in the far-off future. We are not taking our future lightly; our conversations most often revolve around how we will live out our married state.

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IN the entry about the social decline of celibacy, Lou Hanson writes:

Thanks for your piece about happy virgins. One of the odder things about being single today is that one is so often assumed to be ‘gay!’ I am 60, and would be far more tolerated and approved of if I were a homosexual woman, or in a sexual, unmarried state with a man! But being single is seen as so odd and unnatural. And, I have to say that the Catholic parish down the street from me does not feel very welcoming either — I love all the young families, happy couples, I do, but the older parish ten miles down the road feels better to me – still many young families, happy couples, but a nearly equal number of singles. Read More »

YET ANOTHER study has allegedly shown that married couples without children are the happiest couples of all. This is somewhat like saying people who don’t own houses make the happiest home dwellers. Well, duh. If you don’t own a house, you don’t lie awake at night thinking about the leaking roof. Similarly, people without marriages (marriage as an institution is intended for procreation) do not have many of the hassles of marriage.

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Charlotte Perkins Gilman

IT IS striking how many of the most vocal feminists have been intellectual women less suited by nature to the life of motherhood and domesticity. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a prominent America feminist who died in 1935, is one example. But there are many others: Mary Wollstonecraft, Gloria Steinem, Simone de Beauvoir.

Their rebellion is arguably a result of modern society’s rejection of the ideal of the noble virgin. Catholic society always upheld this ideal and gave a role to women who were not suited to marriage. It was not shameful to be unmarried and women were permitted to go against their father’s will in deciding to join a convent. In fact, the Church taught that virginity is higher than the married state. But with the Protestant Revolution, this tradition was overturned. As Marin Luther said, “The word and works of God is quite clear, that women were made either to be wives or prostitutes.” The virgin was no longer hallowed. And Judaism never exalted her. A woman’s role was to produce as many children as possible.

This scorn for the single woman increased in the 20th century, wrote Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira in 1967:

As our century is becoming increasingly tolerant toward the woman who sins against chastity, it is becoming increasingly intolerant toward the single woman. To be a single woman is seen as an almost shameful state of life. The single woman is viewed as a person to be scorned because no one wanted to marry her. Her fate is a useless life off in a corner. She is often pictured as a gossiper, a busybody, an intruder in other people’s lives, with all kinds of complexes and defects.

While people have pity for a woman who falls into sin and wants to help her, they are rude to and scorn the single woman who maintains virginity for noble reasons. As if vice should produce compassion and virtue should be despised. This is a true aberration!

The Church considers that to be single is a better state than to be married for both the man and the woman.

Here is a closer look at Gilman’s life, which ended with medical suicide. I think of all these legions of unhappy intellectuals and how much less revolutionary they might have been if they could have accepted their vocation without waging war against femininity.

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THE blogger Mark Moncrieff examines the differences between the two.

Speaking of hard feminism, Tiberge at Galliwatch writes about a call to disband the group Femen.

MY sincere apologies to readers for failing to keep up with the latest pizza developments in recent weeks. To tell you the truth, the loneliness of my position on the pizzafication of our nation sometimes gets me down and I simply have to back away from it all. However, in the latest news, there is the “flavor-packed” pizza burger above, which actually is old news since pizza burgers have been around since the early days of the Pizza Revolution. Its entrenchment is still worth noting. There is also the laser-guided pizza cutter here. Technological innovation in the field is breathtaking. The average number of pizza vendors per acre will continue to rise as there will be greater accuracy and speed in slicing. Call that a prediction or a prophecy, whatever you will, it is almost certainly true.

A word of caution to readers who live in cold climates: Pizza deliverers do not as a rule slow down in icy weather. Here is the disturbing account of a close call involving a pizza delivery, as told by the editor of the industry publication Pizza Today:

The other night, I was driving home from a meeting. It had been dark for about an hour and our area had experienced snow, lots of ice and exceptionally blustery weather. The temperature was dropping fast, and on my drive home I quickly found myself wishing that I would have had enough common sense not to get out in the first place. At several intersections, despite driving slowly, braking slowly and being generally cautious, I found myself sliding on the ice when I attempted to stop my vehicle. Read More »

Detail from The Inferno, Sandro Botticelli; 1480

A GROUP known as the Satanic Temple has applied to put a statue of Satan at the Oklahoma state capitol building. The group is protesting the erection of a monument to the Ten Commandments. Its spokesman says that it is just using Satan as a rhetorical device to protest favoritism for the Christian view and religion in general. According to CBS:

If you were Satan (not that you’re anything like that), wouldn’t you consider it your greatest triumph to convince human beings that you were metaphorical? But then you would also be delighted by the notion of religious liberty and by state capitol buildings with no explicit recognition of Christ and his social rights. Egalité, liberté, fraternité. Satan is one of the greatest of political philosophers.

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Hollande and Trierweiler

DANIEL O. writes:

Here is another one for the books. Valérie Trierweiler, the “partner” of the French president François Hollande, has had a nervous breakdown, because the president is cheating on her with the actress Julie Gayet and the media is writing about that. Hence, the poor victimized woman, a successful journalist, had to be hospitalized. Trierweiler and Hollande started having an affair when he was still in a relationship with the socialist politician Ségolène Royal, and she was still married to Denis Trierweiler, which was by the way her second marriage. In fact, Trierweiler even was the shared mistress of the socialist Hollande and the ‘conservative’ politician Patrick Devedjian, writes The Mirror. You will reap what you sow.

Such is the couple leading the glorious revolutionary French Nation: a Clintonian President and his ‘First Girlfriend.’ Robespierre once said that virtue without terror is fatal, and terror without virtue is impotent. Clearly, he was wrong. The progressivist terror in France, such as the crackdown on la Manif pour tous, is virtueless and exactly the opposite of impotence — it is political and sexual licence.

Julie Gayet — the new First Girlfriend?

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A University of North Carolina “learning specialist” (i.e., someone who helps students who cannot possibly do college work) found that a majority of the school’s football and basketball players cannot read above an elementary school reading level. Mary Willingham has received death threats and dozens of hate messages, according to The Daily Mail.

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THE ARCHBISHOP of Westminster, Vincent Nichols, is one of nineteen men appointed cardinal by “Pope” Francis. While Archbishop of Birmingham, Nichols approved and defended a celebration of Mohammed’s birth at a Catholic college. He has said that it’s acceptable for homosexuals to adopt children as long as they are single. And according to Wikipedia:

In February 2010, Nichols was thanked by British education minister Ed Balls for supporting a sexual education bill which would require schools – including Catholic schools – to explain civil partnerships and, as Balls put it, give “a balanced view on abortion… give both sides of the argument… explain how to access an abortion, the same is true on contraception as well.” Balls characterised the position of Nichols and the Church agencies as an improvement on the previous situation: “To have the support of the Catholic Church and Archbishop Nichols in these changes is, I think, very, very important, is a huge step forward.”[41]

In other words, this is just the kind of man one would expect this flagrantly non-Catholic “pontiff” to promote. In his tenure as Archbishop of Westminster, the leading Catholic position in England and Wales, Nichols also endorsed masses for homosexuals at which the following prayer to the “erotic Christ,” a masterpiece of New Age Novus Ordo-ism, was said:

‘Rainbow Christ, you embody all the colors of the world. Rainbows serve as bridges between different realms: Heaven and Earth, east and west, queer and non-queer. Inspire us to remember the values expressed in the rainbow flag of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community.

Red is for life, the root of spirit. Living and Self-Loving Christ, you are our Root. Free us from shame, and grant us the grace of healthy pride so we can follow our own inner light. With the red stripe in the rainbow, we give thanks that God created us just the way we are.

Orange is for sexuality, the fire of spirit. Erotic Christ, you are our Fire, the Word made flesh. Free us from exploitation, and grant us the grace of mutual relationships. With the orange stripe in the rainbow, kindle a fire of passion in us.

Yellow is for self-esteem, the core of spirit. Out Christ, you are our Core. Free us from closets of secrecy, and give us the guts and grace to come out. With the yellow stripe in the rainbow, build our confidence.

Green is for love, the heart of spirit. Transgressive Outlaw Christ, you are our Heart, breaking rules out of love. In a world obsessed with purity, you touch the sick and eat with outcasts. Free us from conformity, and grant us the grace of deviance. With the green stripe in the rainbow, fill our hearts with untamed compassion for all beings.

Blue is for self-expression, the voice of spirit. Liberator Christ, you are our Voice, speaking out against all forms of oppression. Free us from apathy, and grant us the grace of activism. With the blue stripe in the rainbow, motivate us to call for justice.

Violet is for vision, the wisdom of spirit. Interconnected Christ, you are our Wisdom, creating and sustaining the universe. Free us from isolation, and grant us the grace of interdependence. With the violet stripe in the rainbow, connect us with others and with the whole creation.

Rainbow colors come together to make one light, the crown of universal consciousness. Hybrid and All-Encompassing Christ, you are our Crown, both human and divine. Free us from rigid categories, and grant us the grace of interwoven identities. With the rainbow, lead us beyond black-and-white thinking to experience the whole spectrum of life.

Rainbow Christ, you light up the world. You make rainbows as a promise to support all life on Earth. In the rainbow space we can see all the hidden connections between sexualities, genders, and races. Like the rainbow, may we embody all the colors of the world! Amen.’

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AT The Orthosphere, Dr. Thomas F. Bertonneau describes the breakdown in reading ability and discipline he has witnessed as a literature professor. Increasingly, students tell him they cannot understand assigned readings and about ten percent flatly refuse to read at all, probably because it is too demanding. He writes:

Post-literacy is both a symptom of the general breakdown of North American society and a cause of many other aspects of that disaster. It combines insidiously, for example, with the trends of narcissism and group-identity that have so distorted our “liberal” politics; it helps make people vulnerable to propaganda and demagoguery; and it stultifies the cultural scene by deleting the ability to think. Indeed, post-literacy has an ideological expression under such terms as “critical thinking,” which is a euphemism designed to equalize groupthink with actual ratiocination and judgment. “Offense” and “discomfort” are likewise ideological constructions rooted in the post-literate “shame culture.” Read More »