THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Everything is a symbol. The names of the two girls who introduced Obama last week – Zea and Luna – speak of conscious rebellion against norms.

“Zea” I take for a feminization of Zeus, the etymon of which is an Indo-European word with the generic meaning of “a god.” Thus Zea is a double-whammy. It feminizes the King of the Gods and it semi-sacralizes the name-bearer.  “Luna” is obvious; she is the moon under her Latin title. But notice the inconsistency: Zea is Greek and there is a Greek equivalent of Luna, namely Selena, which is a female name that one sometimes encounters. Read More »

BUCK writes:

Nine year-old twins Zea and Luna introduced President Barack Obama at the White House’s LGBT Pride Month celebration last Thursday.

The two girls took turns reading from their prepared notes: Read More »

John Quincy Adams, 1843

PATERNAL AUTHORITY is the foundation of all good government. Weak fatherhood creates weak leaders.

On this Father’s Day, let us celebrate fatherly authority founded in love, a tradition which we can look to in an age when fathers have been dethroned.

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Christopher Manion’s 2011 Crisis magazine article, “The Catholic Bishops and Immigration Reform” is an indictment of the malfeasance of the “American” (italics entirely intentional) Catholic Bishops concerning immigration and the United States’ borders that is timelier than ever.  I highly recommend it as the execrable Charles Schumer, boy-idiot Marco Rubio, man-lunatic John McCain and light-in-the-loafers Lindsey Graham conspire with Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic Party and the Republican establishment — bought by such as Sheldon Adelson and Mark Zuckerberg — to destroy the United States through their illegal-alien-amnestying, “guest”-worker-increasing, legal-and-illegal-immigration-increasing, immigration enforcement-gutting S. 744 bill.

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BOB writes:

The liberal website Slate had a good article about how the $27,000 figure popularly used to estimate the cost of an “average wedding” is essentially a statistical contrivance of the wedding industry, which obviously has an incentive to encourage people to think that spending such (and greater) sums on weddings is normal. Still, difference between mean and median, and the median wedding is around $17,000. Selection bias (i.e. the woman who respond to these surveys are likely to be bigger spenders than those who don’t know there is a “Brides” magazine) probably accounts for some of that. But still.

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ANONYMOUS writes:

I am appealing to your readers because, as a longtime reader of your site, I believe in their intelligence and your own. I have been thinking long and hard about the changes in our society, and I believe my story illuminates some of the major issues at hand here.

I was born into an abusive family–not as “abusive” is used today to mean everything from not permitting homosexuality to minor discipline, but to two alcoholic parents who used my siblings and me as punching bags. Read More »

IN AN article posted at Gates of Vienna last month, Norwegian boys describe their experiences growing up in heavily Muslim neighborhoods of Oslo:

Andreas believes that the Norwegian culture is being squeezed out.

“Nobody wants to be a Norwegian here. Norwegian is synonymous with weakness. This is a feeling that is also being conveyed by the teachers. Read More »

THE WASHINGTON POST reports:

More white people died in the United States last year than were born, a surprising slump coming more than a decade before the Census Bureau says that the ranks of white Americans will likely drop with every passing year.

Population estimates for 2012 released Thursday show what’s known as a natural decrease — a straightforward calculation of births minus deaths — of about 12,400 people among the nation’s 198 million non-Hispanic whites.

Only if reporters Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik do not read their own newspaper, in which various means of limiting births and demoralizing the white population are celebrated every single day, could they possibly consider this news “surprising.” Since it is unlikely that they do not read their own newspaper, their use of this word is entirely dishonest.

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KAREN I. writes:

I wanted to let you know your website and the comments made by readers about several issues have helped me make a very important, possibly life-changing, decision about my son’s education.

Read More »

SPENCER WARREN writes:

1. In an NPR interview in 2001, Obama sharply criticized the Constitution for guaranteeing ‘negative liberties,’ i.e. for restricting the government in order to protect the liberty of the individual, but not ‘positive liberties,’ as embodied in welfare and other ‘rights’ similar to those found in the constitutions of Cuba, North Korea, China, and Stalinist Russia. O referred to “the so-called Founding Fathers.”

2. Last summer, O made this confession of his utter alienation from and hatred of our country’s creed: Read More »

IN A PREVIOUS entry, I quoted Kidist P. Asrat on the ugliness of Asian urban neighborhoods in Toronto. Readers noted that by comparison they are no worse than the trashy architecture pervasive in Canada and America, a point to which I responded.

Jay from Goshen adds to the discussion:

If a municipality wants to take the trouble, it can pass ordinances that even McDonald’s has to follow. That is why in some locales, McDonald’s restaurants look not only inconspicuous, but attractive. My family and I drove a long distance once in a very isolated part of the southwest. We finally found a McDonald’s. Normally I hate the place, but in that instance, it was comforting and reassuring. It was constructed of local materials and that normally garish golden arch was small, and attractive, under the circumstances. Read More »

THE Rubio-Schumer immigration bill easily passed its first hurdle in the Senate today as senators voted, 82-15, to move it to the floor for debate. See Senator Tim Kaine,  Virginia Democrat, delivering a speech in favor of the bill in Spanish here. He did not deliver an English version during his speech. The day when such a thing would have been unthinkable is long since passed.

Most of the country’s 11 million illegal aliens would receive green cards under the measure and legal immigration levels would double. Here is a report by Norman Matloff, posted previously at VDARE, on the proposed increase in legal immigration for high-tech workers. Countering the argument that the country needs the skills of foreign engineers, Matloff says the availability of foreign high-tech labor is responsible for an “internal brain drain in the United States.”

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THE Obama administration has dropped its weak attempt to keep the Morning-After-Pill from availability without a prescription for girls as young as 11. So much for the vaunted concern of the president for the health and welfare of young girls. And so much for the righteousness of feminists, who say they stand for the welfare of women when they are seeking to harm them in ever more novel ways.

Here are some facts about levonorgestrel, the key ingredient in the pill. Notice this: Read More »

THE French demonstrations against same-sex “marriage” represent a profound development — the emergence of a true anti-liberal movement in Europe. Here is more evidence that France is awakening. George Buscemi, at LifeSiteNews, reports on the Antigones, a group of traditional women who’ve named themselves after the Greek mythical heroine who refused to abide by a tyrannical law that kept her from burying her brother. The Antigones specifically oppose the feminist group, FEMEN, whose members appear in public with bared breasts to commit frenzied acts of protest and vandalism.

This is part of the Antigones’ manifesto:

“Femen, you affirm that a woman’s fight is feminist, we say that it is feminine.

“Femen, you affirm that women’s rights are defended with bared breasts, we say that they are acquired through dignity.

“Femen, you affirm that religion is alienation; we say that for many of us it is the way to freedom and self-realisation.

“Femen, you affirm that machismo dominates society and you combat men. We answer that it is only with men that we can truly become women, whole and complete.”

ALAN M. writes:

There is an angle to this story about an IRS agent bullying a woman from a pro-life group that I believe most people will miss: immigration.

The agent in question, Sherry Wan, is likely a not-so-recent Chinese immigrant judging by her accent and the fact that she is employed by the federal government.

Government affirmative action programs lead to the government being filled with a high proportion of immigrants relative to general society. When we import people from societies that do not share our worldview, we end up with a society, and in this case, a government, that is less likely to share our worldview.

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KIDIST P. ASRAT, at Reclaiming Beauty, counters the argument that mass immigration to Toronto has made it a more vibrant city. She writes:

Yet, when we go to the areas most densely populated by these “ethnics” all we see are deteriorating restaurants and dull, colorless houses. So much for vibrancy. Even those areas where reasonably well-to-do (these days they are “Asians” – i.e. Chinese, Koreans and Filipinos, and the South Asians – i.e. Indians and Pakistani) immigrants reside, we find generally inferior homes, with no landscaping or maintenance of the surroundings. Dull and lusterless places.

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TERRY MORRIS writes:

We live close to a large lake in a neighborhood that’s generally safe for the children to sort of roam around as long as we know where they are and what they’re doing. One thing we allow the older children to do is to go down to the lake to fish as long as there is someone to accompany them.

A couple of weeks ago our 16-year-old daughter and our 12-year-old son went down to the lake to fish, where later a 17-year-old boy (not from the neighborhood) happened along and showed some interest in our daughter. When he asked her for a date, she answered that he would “have to talk to my Dad.” Read More »

BOB writes:

I thought you might find this Washington Post article interesting.

Phyllis Richman, a woman who applied to a graduate professional program at Harvard in 1961, finds a letter in which a Harvard faculty member asked her how she planned to balance her career with her family obligations. A half-century later, she wrote him a rude letter in response. He responded:

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