THERE are more than 800 comments after today’s New York Times article about a potential military strike on Syria. Though they are notably devoid of the blistering, rabid hatred directed to George W. Bush in 2003, and a few comments blame everything on Bush, they are overwhelmingly negative. They include comments such as this:

This is being done for Obama to save face. Those who support this don’t understand what we are getting into. Obama is the most disliked President ever. He is a complete failure and to show his manhood he wants to do this. What a pathetic little man. Remember 9-11, thats [sic] who we are supporting, the legacy of Bid Laden [sic]. I’m ashamed to be an American. I can honestly say I am embarrassed every time Obama and Pelosi and McCain open their mouths. There is no justification for a strike.

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ALAN writes:

I would like to confirm Paul’s remark about the “virtuous delightfulness” of American television programs for children in the 1950s. I was there too, and I remember it well.

Children in the 1950s were the last generation to grow up in homes that were not saturated by television. It was there, but our parents used it selectively. They were principled enough to permit us to enjoy it in limited doses. They did not permit it to dominate our lives or theirs.

Because of that, children who grew up in the 1950s still spent thousands of hours of their childhoods actually doing things instead of watching other people do things on TV. To replace the former with the latter is, in effect, to neutralize children’s capacity to think, imagine, and initiate;  to pre-empt the most vitally important part of childhood, which is play (consisting equally of imagination and self-initiated activities);  and to produce a generation of spectators, sycophants, and trend-followers.

Modern parents who imagine they are doing their children a favor by exposing them to TV (any TV) from infancy onward are tragically mistaken.  They would do them a favor by not having any TV at all in their homes.

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The Pantheon in Paris

FRENCH President François Hollande suggested earlier this year that in the interest of equality more women should be among the 74 celebrated figures buried in the crypt of the famous Panthéon in Paris. So far only two women are buried there: Marie Curie and Sophie Berthelot, who is there on the merits of her husband, the chemist Marcellin Berthelot. A feminist group Osez le Féminisme (Dare To Be a Feminist) has been pressing the cause and a poll is being held to decide on women who qualify, with the favored candidates including Simone de Beauvoir and Olympe de Gouge, an advocate of women’s rights during the French Revolution.

Those who say there should be more women in the necropolis have a point. Many of the men buried in the Panthéon, which dates to the early years of the French Revolution, were revolutionary figures. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Marat (who was later disinterred)  are among those who were buried there. (See a full list here.) Famous feminists such as De Beauvoir and De Gouge fit in with the spirit of the mausoleum.

The irony is that none of the women candidates for interment today had the enormous power and influence of the immortal female figure who stands behind the Panthéon: Saint Genevieve, (422-512), the patron saint of Paris. The Panthéon, in the Latin Quarter, was originally intended by Louis XV to be a church dedicated to the saint, replacing a former abbey in her name. The king vowed in 1744 that if he recovered from illness he would replace the Abbey of St. Genevieve with a magnificent edifice. He did recover, and chose Abel-François Poisson, marquis de Marigny to begin the project. Jacques-Germain Soufflot was selected in 1755 to design the church and construction on the enormous neoclassical domed structure began two years later. In 1791, the National Constituent Assembly ordered that the building become a mausoleum, not a church, for the burial of honored Frenchmen. In the meantime, it has been reconsecrated as a church more than once, but today is a secular necropolis.

Genevieve was a simple peasant girl from Nanterre who attracted the attention of bishops and later became famous for saving Paris in 451 from destruction by the Huns under Attila. She was well known for her sanctity and holy works in Paris when the barbarian raiders approached the city. She advised citizens not to flee and to remain in the city in a state of prayer. As a result of the presence of large numbers in the city, Attila is said to have diverted his warriors to Orléans.

According to the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira,

[St. Genevieve] rose up like a cedar of Lebanon and scented the panorama with her presence. She bloomed like a flower in the center of the West. There was no press, no radio, no television – o what happiness! Nonetheless her fame flew.

None of the female candidates for the Panthéon can approach the glory and inspiration of Genevieve. If her story is true, if by the sheer force of her character, holiness and love of God, she was able to help save Paris then all of feminism is false.

St. Genevieve

ROB writes:

I started my working career firmly believing (without evidence or experience, of course!) that men and women are equally suited to the professional workplace, and I have worked beside, and sometimes for, women all my life. I have had many able female subordinates, colleagues and bosses. However, my experience of working with them has been profoundly different from my expectations. I have generally found women in the professional workplace to be less collegial than men. With a few notable exceptions, the women I have worked with are quick to see any disagreement or criticism as impugning their competence. Time and effort goes into dancing around their sensitivities which would have been better spent on getting the job done. It is true there are some men like this as well, but not the majority.

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I HAVEN’T seen the movie The Butler, but I feel as if I have seen it. Aren’t we living through a similar exercise in fiction every single day? Take our president. He’s not a noble butler facing a world of inept and evil white power, but he is starring in a similarly uplifting film called The President, also featuring Oprah on screens near you. Obama’s not really a president. He’s never really been a president, but he has been acting like one. He’s been playing this role so long it comes naturally most of the time, although when he has to act as a president who is very, very serious, as presidents often are, there is the slight temptation, ever present, to smile. He holds it in.

Right now, the President is acting the role of a president in a military crisis. The plot switches to Syria, a Middle Eastern country in need of America the Free to sort everything out. The brilliant, creative producers have decided that pilots flying Cruise missiles and pyrotechnic explosions would help the plot. It’s only natural that the viewers want to see the President, who is the main character, do something. There will be scenes of him at the war table, surrounded by his advisers. His sleeves will be rolled up and he will look authoritative and concerned. He will also be shown mid-stride on the tarmac of Air Force One with that very, very serious expression. The President is about to launch a military strike without Congressional approval and for no compelling national interest (they couldn’t fit that in) other than the dictates of the script. He has a large cast of actors to play along and expensive, high-tech props. The scenes will be so realistic that real people will die, a real international crisis will result and America will really commit a “moral obscenity.” But that’s the price of art and besides this amazing, fast-paced, action-packed movie called The President is free for everyone.

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MILEY CYRUS, the former Disney child actress widely viewed a few years ago as wholesome, is now just a porn star. But she’s been heading that way for years. Much has been written about her raunchy performance for MTV Sunday, in which she simulated sexual intercourse and masturbation, a performance which was almost certainly calculated to bring on just the sort of controversy it inspired.

There is only one proper response to a performance such as Miley’s. She should have been immediately arrested for public obscenity. But we don’t live in a sane world. Porn is perfectly legal. Miley was expressing her First Amendment rights.

M. Catherine Evans writes about her performance at The American Thinker : Read More »

THE British Catholic blogger Mundabor writes about the Archbishop of Canterbury’s recent remarks on the legalization of sodomite unions. Mundabor writes:

Anglicanism has become a heathenish cult of man with no resemblance anymore to any Christian thinking worth[y] of the name. What a bunch of clowns, what a cartoon “religion”.

DON VINCENZO writes:

I know not whether the next gaffe of Pope Francis will be liturgical or ecclesiastical, but what I do know is that the Holy Father lives, with regard to the situation in the Middle East, in a delusional world. See this recent piece by the Society of St. Pius X about the Supreme Pontiff’s remarks urging Christians to respect the teachings, symbols and values of Islam. In this delusional state, the Pope is far-too-quiet about the fate of Middle Eastern Christians, especially as our valiant Commander-in-Chief verges on sending Cruise missiles into Syria.

Perhaps instead of having the parishes hear a sermon on why amnesty for illegal aliens is virtuous, the Vatican should lay out the whys and wherefores of what is happening in Syria, including the commentary of the Mother Superior of the convent of Homs, Syria. It was she – Mother Marie de la Croix – who actually spoke at the Vatican a year or so ago, but received little attention. Why wasn’t she afforded the opportunity to tell her story worldwide?

The victory of the “Syrian Rebel Army” will be the death knell of Christians in that ancient land and the Pontiff and the Mother Superior and the Vatican bureaucrats know this; yet, this Pontiff sees fit to laud the religious belief that brings men to destroy the Church.

SCOTT H. writes:

Talk about drinking parties, here’s one for you (actually it’s a two’fer):

Accuser testifies at Naval Academy sex assault hearing.

“WASHINGTON –  A midshipman testified Wednesday that she didn’t remember being sexually assaulted by three former Navy football players after a night of heavy drinking, but she said one of the men told her she had sex with him and another accused player.”

Drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, but this midshipman is now a senior at the Naval Academy soon to be leading “people.” She states she had consensual sex with someone else when she woke up the next day. Classy broad. It’s no wonder my son in Afghanistan, who’s team is obligated to have female attachments, has zero respect for female military members. The females are derisively refered to as “mattress pads.”

IN 1336, the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux, now part of the Alps in southern France, with his brother and two servants. The mountain is over 6,000 feet high. At that time, recreational mountain climbing was rare. Here is a letter the poet wrote about their excursion. From the letter:

We found an old shepherd in one of the mountain dales, who tried, at great length, to dissuade us from the ascent, saying that some fifty years before he had, in the same ardour of youth, reached the summit, but had gotten for his pains nothing except fatigue and regret, and clothes and body torn by the rocks and briars. No one, so far as he or his companions knew, had ever tried the ascent before or after him. But his counsels increased rather than diminished our desire to proceed, since youth is suspicious of warnings. Read More »

A READER writes:

Please forgive my poor English. It is not my first language.

So, a little background: I’m a 20-year-old college student in a major university in my country, currently in the third year of my undergraduate course. As a good fraction of male college students, I come from a very socially awkward adolescence, and, as soon as I got in college, I was desperate to go to all the parties, and drink all the alcohol, and please myself from all the college girls that would be anxiously waiting for me, in these places. I should have gone to a total of about 20-30 parties, until a few months ago.

It turned out that all the repressed feelings of my adolescence that brought me into this quest lead me to nothing but a deep sense of disappointment. I have found that alcohol is not the happiness potion that people try to make it seem to be; that most people who call themselves “friends” of yours want nothing with you but to not leave them alone in these parties; and, most importantly, that the process of finding mates in these parties is the most humiliating and hurtful thing I have ever subjected myself to. Read More »

DAVID J. writes:

Good day! While perusing the CNN website recently, I came upon a nearly cheesecake photograph of Marissa Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo! The picture, intended for this spread in Vogue magazine, immediately reminded me of the following maxim by the late Lawrence Auster.

When men occupy a high office, it is for the purpose of doing a job. The job comes first. When women occupy a high office, it is for their self and their vanity. Public boasting about their “power” comes first, along with displays of themselves.

It is astonishing that Ms. Mayer devotes so much time seeking attention about her position and marketing her attractiveness.  Feminists consider it a victory that a woman has ascended atop the corporate world, especially in the hyper-competitive field of high technology.  Feminism states that women are more than mere sexual objects and can do everything that men can do (and equally as well).

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YOU can read the full text of Obama’s speech about Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech here, but you needn’t bother. Basically, President Obama said:

1. A lot has changed for blacks in 50 years, but the white man is still no good.

2. People who make more money than you are greedy.

3. Some of you are wondering why things have gotten so much worse since “I Have a Dream,” but King believed in jobs for everyone and I do too. Vote for Democrats and you will get a job. Someday.

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A HARVARD study of continental Europe shows no correlation between gun control laws and reduced murder rates. Breitbart reports on the study.

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Martin Luther King Memorial at the National Mall

IN A memorable 2011 VFR discussion titled, “Contrary Thoughts on the Martin Luther King Holiday and its Significance in American Life,” Lawrence Auster mentioned King’s activities on the night of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, which has been the subject of an outpouring of racial atonement in the media this week, a sort of Yom Kippur for white liberals. In that discussion, Auster wrote:

As for MLK’s sexual activities, according to his own long-time lieutenant Ralph Abernathy, he did carry on with a great variety of women more or less continuously. He even was having a very audible sex session with a woman in his hotel room immediately after he delivered the “I have a dream speech,” while his confederates, gathered in the main room of the suite, heard the session going on. That he behaved in such a manner on that historic day suggests a person who is seriously disordered. On another occasion, which as I remember was just before his death, as told in Abernathy’s book, King got into sleazy arguments and physical fights with two different paramours on the same evening. The evidence is established that MLK was not just a man who had an adulterous liaison here and there as he traveled around the country, living and working under tremendous stress, and an object of awe and admiration, a situation that will naturally present sexual temptations, but that he was spectacularly out of control in his sexual life. A man who is spectacularly out of control in his sexual life is not a person who can properly be seen as a moral leader. Also there is evidence that King was aware of this darkness in himself, was deeply ashamed of it, but felt powerless to do anything about it, and let it continue to control him.

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

In New Mexico, sodomatrimony has not (yet) been inflicted on the state by legislation or referendum.  Nevertheless, in two New Mexico counties, judges – pretending to see an “equal rights violation” in not issuing licenses to sodomites purporting to permit them to “marry” one another – have just decreed that county clerks must issue licenses permitting these obscene parodies of marriage to proceed.  We’ll see if New Mexicans take any state-level action through their legislature to reverse these judges’ mischief.

New Mexico’s Republican – and Catholic – governor, Susana Martinez, has already said she plans to do nothing to challenge this.  The state’s Democratic – and Baptist – attorney general, Gary King, has said the same.  King plans to challenge Martinez for the governor’s mansion instead.  So New Mexicans for Normal Life are without allies at the statewide level of both major parties.  Martinez even trotted out that oh-so-stale line so beloved of Catholic politicians looking for an excuse to defy the Church’s teaching: “personally opposed, but…” Read More »

FRED OWENS writes:

Here is a look at the future for aging boomers. The cause of this problem is arguable, and possible solutions are worth discussing. But the numbers themselves are facts. We did not have enough children to give each one of us a nursemaid and blame who you will, the fact itself is rather stubborn.

It might be worthwhile to urge younger people in their child-bearing years to take heed.

But even so, we aging boomers will have to care for each other, one ancient cripple aiding another, and suffer through it.

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