THE PHILADELPHIA City Council last week approved a bill that would require the city’s health plan to pay for sex change surgery, as well as psychotherapy, hormone treatments, and laser-hair removal for those pretending to be the opposite sex. A city that can barely meet its operating expenses and that has scared legions of businesses away with its draconian taxes and crime has now turned to investing in the medical mutilation of its citizens. Perhaps there is logic in this.

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MARY THOM, former editor of Ms. Magazine and a guiding force of the American feminist movement, died on Friday. The New York Times, which never fails to inform us of the deaths of even the most marginal of feminist leaders, reports in her obituary:

Ms. Thom never married, and her friends said her true love was her motorcycle, a 1996 Honda Magna 750. On it, she zipped around town — to dinners in the West Village, feminist talks, and back home to her apartment on the Upper West Side.

On Friday, she was riding on the Saw Mill River Parkway shortly after 4 p.m. when she hit a car, throwing her onto the road, the Westchester County police said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Ms. Thom was 68 years old.

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THE nineteenth century artist and writer William Morris brought immense beauty to Victorian homes. His designs continue to inspire decorators. “It helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful things,” he wrote. His wallpapers, such as this Blue Fruit Wallpaper, were in middle class Victorian homes, as well as great estates. Other examples can be found here. Morris wrote that any decoration is “futile if it does not remind you of something beyond itself, craftsmanship involving not only the mastery of technique, but the evocation of spiritual qualities of breadth, imagination, and order.”

Unfortunately, Morris was a socialist and thus incongruously promoted ideas that would lead to an assault of ugliness, domestic and otherwise.

BLESSED POPE JOHN PAUL II continues to inspire hideous public statuary. This 45-foot fiberglass behemoth will be officially unveiled tomorrow in the Polish city of Czestochowa. The businessman, Leszek Lyson, who funded it and erected it on private land, is said to be hoping it will qualify for the Guinness Book of Records, which shows the level of artistic ambition involved. The statue should make people stop and think, Lyson said. Yes, I suppose so. Monolithic statues of Lenin made people stop and think too. They made them stop and think of one man and his role in the New World Order.

Lenin outside Finland Station in St. Petersburg

Similar to another monstrosity, the statue of John Paul outside the Termini Station in Rome (see below), the new papal tower, with its widespread arms, is an all-embracing figure. “Come one, Come all. The Church is whatever you wish to make it,” it seems to say. Though he helped resist Communism in his homeland of Poland and is not to be equated with or placed into the same category as Lenin, the globe-trotting John Paul was a revolutionary figure who helped the Church become more International YMCA than the Eternal City of God. Revolutionary figures inspire revolutionary art.

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IN THIS video, previously posted at Galliawatch, a French woman, demonstrating on April 17th against the legalization of homosexual “marriage,” is hauled away by the police as she protests that she has done nothing wrong.

Tamerlane's army attacks Nerges, Georgia in the spring of 1396

AT the Center for Political Islam, Kenneth Roberts examines the Islamic concept of honor and its probable role in the Boston Marathon bombings. Roberts writes:

Why do some American journalists have trouble discerning the motives behind the Boston bombings? The Tsarnaev brothers killed Bostonians for the honor of Islam. Westerners do not understand the Islamic concept of honor. ‘Honor’ to a Muslim is something as concrete and tangible as the Washington Monument, the Colorado River or the Rocky Mountains.

Honor as Plunder

To a Muslim, ‘honor’ is as real as money in the bank or gold coins hidden in a box in the drawer. Honor brings prestige to Islam, to Mohammed and to Allah. Because ‘honor’ is so important in Islam, the main goal of jihad is to acquire more ‘honor’ for Islam. How this acquisition is done is simple. It is done through (sic) by humiliating kafirs. For Muslims, honor is real and concrete, and not merely an abstract concept. Read More »

SEBASTIEN writes:

I was at the demonstration at the Place des Invalides in Paris on Friday the 19th of April, when a Catholic priest was arrested and kicked in the head by the police. There is a lengthy video of what transpired here.

Every night last week, there was an official demonstration from 7:30 p.m. until around 10 p.m. After 10 p.m., we are all supposed to disperse and this is what most people do. I was very happy to see our SSPX priests turn up at around 9:30 pm to be with us for the rest of the night.

Firstly, l’Abbé Beauvais stood in front of the barricades and got the crowd to repeat in song lines which he had composed a little earlier:  “A real family is a Daddy and a Mummy.” (The films I made are here.) After the singalong, the game of tag with the riot police started. As I am a timid soul, I preferred to watch from the sidelines but you can have a very good idea of what happened by watching the footage here. Starting at minute 8:52, you can see the Catholic brother trying to intervene during the arrest of a minor and they both get dragged away. As the brother gets dragged through the barricade, you can see the plain clothes police getting some violent kicks in his head. These are his injuries. Read More »

The Tsarnaev parents and Tamerlan

DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL reports on the immigration history of the family of the Boston bombing suspects:

The Tsarnaev family committed immigration fraud, falsely claiming persecution and requesting asylum it never should have gotten. You can blame that on the Bush Administration, which granted the Tsarnaev family both tourist visas to come here and then asylum for the entire family . . . less than a year after 9/11, when scrutiny of Muslim applicants for asylum should have been stepped up. Instead, Bush Administration pandering to Islam was stepped up. Read More »

KARL D. writes:

Have you noticed how the word “hero” has been bandied about by the media regarding almost anyone and everyone who was involved in the Boston bombing? The man who found the bomber hiding in his boat and called the police? Hero. A victim who lost both his legs who visited another victim in the same hospital to give her a gift? Hero.

What is even more surprising is the absolute venom I have encountered from people when I point out the fact that neither of these men were heroes. One was merely a good citizen doing his civic duty, and the other a victim who performed a kind act for another victim. It seems most people really do operate in a knee-jerk emotional way. The fact that the true meaning of the word “hero” has become so watered down as to render it meaningless does not seem to bother them in the least. Interestingly, out of all the people who called me a “nasty little man” for pointing this out, the majority were female.

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FEMINISM has resulted in many terrific career opportunities for women, but few fields previously closed to them due to stubborn convention are as rich with novel opportunities as prison work.

According to federal prosecutors, 13 female “corrections officers” were enjoying their careers so much that they essentially handed control of the Baltimore City Detention Center over to a gang, helping gang members sell and smuggle drugs and offering them tough love on the side, The Washington Post reported yesterday. A leader of the Black Guerilla Family fathered five children in the Baltimore jail with four of the guards since 2009. Two of the women had tattoos of the gang leader’s name, perhaps tip-offs to the authorities that something was not quite right. Read More »

Courtesy of National Gallery of Art

FROM Colorful Realm of Living Beings, a 30-scroll set of paintings by the eighteenth century Japanese artist, Itō Jakuchū.

AS ANTICIPATED, the National Assembly of France today passed the highly controversial “Taubira law” redefining marriage and legalizing homosexual unions. The bill was approved by a comfortable margin in the Socialist-majority Assembly, 331-225. The Associated Press reports:

Legions of officers with water cannons braced outside the National Assembly for possible violence on an issue that galvanized the country’s faltering right.

According to the AP, protests that draw hundreds of thousands constitute the “faltering right.” Don’t be fooled by attempts to present this issue as closed. It is not over in France. The protesters have vowed to continue and are likely to be motivated by this action by the National Assembly, which has disregarded their insistence that homosexual “marriage” and adoption are harmful to children and will devastate French culture. A national demonstration is scheduled for May 26 and, in the meantime, ongoing smaller demonstrations are expected.

The protesters have discovered their principles and the words to express them in a way that those opposed to homosexual marriage in other countries have not. They will not surrender and this action by the National Assembly bodes a great deal of strife and division ahead. The sign carried by protesters last week above (and posted at Galliawatch) reads:

“A civilization rests on what is demanded of men, not on what is given to them.”

The French, in the end, may awaken in more profound ways to the threats to their civilization posed by what Philippe Bénéton calls “equality by default,” the radical equality that banishes meaningful distinctions.

Default man is liberated from every norm and every model; he no longer forms part of an order that transcends him. He enjoys a sovereign independence. He is a stranger in the universe. [Equality by Default; 2004, p. 21]

Large numbers of the French people have turned against this state of radical liberation. In the end, however, it is not a question of numbers, of how many people on either side of the issue there are. It is a question of right and wrong, and even if only a handful of protesters hit the streets in Paris, there would still be only one right answer to this question.

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THE Daily Mail has good coverage of the Bostom bombing suspects, including this article about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s American wife, Katherine Russell, whose friends say she had a less than idyllic marriage. There is no mention that Russell’s friends or family did anything to try and prevent her marriage.

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Jonas Hassen Khemiri

JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI, a celebrated novelist and playwright in Sweden, has written a denunciation of white Swedish society, translated here for The New York Times, in response to reports of racial profiling by police. The piece is called “Sweden’s Closet Racists,” and could have been written by any nonwhite American college student gamely fulfilling an essay assignment to describe his history of brutal subjugation.

Khemiri speaks on behalf of “[w]e Swedes who do not fit the outdated blond, blue-eyed stereotype of what a true Swede should look like.” The offspring of an Arab/Swedish marriage, he says dark-skinned immigrants are subjected to “low-intensity oppression.” What is this oppression? We find a list of familiar trivial complaints. Though it appears Khemiri has been lavished with attention by Swedish society for his writings, he has in fact been repeatedly disrespected. He has suffered the inconvenience of being scrutinized by police and security guards and the unpleasant experiences of being chased by skinheads. No mention that this extra scrutiny is related to the crime rate of Sweden’s nonwhites. No mention of the whites who have been chased, mugged and raped.

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ALAN writes:

In your post on the “Religion of Peace,” you quoted a newspaper statement that Americans are “searching for answers.” That struck me as hilarious and true. I immediately recalled a remark Ayn Rand made in a speech in 1960:

The truth about the intellectual state of the modern world … which distinguishes it from other periods of cultural crises, is the fact that what people are seeking is not the answers to problems, but the reassurance that no answers are possible.

— Philosophy: Who Needs It; Ayn Rand (1982), p. 71

Modernists are searching not for answers but for new and improved excuses and evasions, because there is nothing Modernists hate more than responsibility and accountability. The first responsibility of any grown-up is to see that X is so, i.e., that there are certain realities that cannot be evaded, papered over, or defined out of existence. But this is precisely what modern Americans – “Liberals” and “Conservatives” alike – assiduously refuse to see. To borrow a phrase from English professor Eric Larsen, modern Americans are “a nation gone blind.” They are morally obtuse.

Evil exists. Some people are evil. Not all people want the same things. Conflict exists and is inevitable between and among all people. Ordinary men and women have understood these things for centuries. Modern Americans do not want to understand them because they stand at odds with utopian fantasies like diversity, multiculturalism, tolerance, and open borders.  Read More »

THE handling of the bombing in Boston, with an entire metropolitan region put into lockdown as the suspects were hunted, has handed would-be terrorists and criminals with new incentives, the libertarian blogger George Donnelly argues:

For a maximum investment of perhaps $1 or $2 thousand dollars, ideologically-motivated individuals can cost the economy perhaps as much as $1 billion dollars in economic output. Nobody yet knows how much it costs to shut down down Boston for a day but $1 billion is about how much the city produces on a daily basis.

What is it that leads to such over-reaction? How can so many be put into a state of panic and submission over a relatively minor threat? Tyrannical bureaucracy and individual spinelessness make terrorism highly effective. The more criminals see that they can control large numbers of people, the more motivated they will be, just as school shootings become more common the more would-be murderers know they can make easy victims out of the utterly passive inhabitants of school buildings.

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Tamerlane, the 15th century Muslim ruler who is believed to have slaughtered 90,000 in a single day.

ONCE AGAIN, we see the obvious turned into the mysterious. The New York Times describes the factors behind the Boston bombing as “cryptic,” “inscrutable” and baffling. The nation is “searching for answers.” Scott Shane writes:

Even President Obama, when he addressed the nation on Friday night after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured, seemed to be searching for answers. “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?” he said.

It remains to be seen whether personal grievance or some type of ideology was behind the attack, in which investigators say the Tsarnaevs packed black powder into pressure cookers to kill and maim people.

Both brothers were open about their devotion to Islam, and Tamerlan’s Web postings suggested an attraction to radicalism, but neither appears to have publicly embraced the ideology of violent jihad. [emphases added]

And once again, we turn to the relatives of Muslim terrorists — their relatives!! — for answers. So strong is the desire for and presumption of psychological motives only that reporters consider the relatives of terrorists reliable informers. This is comparable to going to the families of urban gangsters or mobsters for information about their characters and motives. Was the father of Al Capone the best person to shed light on his motives? Shane writes:

Their relatives have expressed anguished bafflement, and it is conceivable that the motive for the attack will remain as inscrutable as those of some mass shootings in recent years.

Anguished bafflement. Cryptic motives. We are searching for answers. But we will probably never know the answers. The attacks will remain inscrutable. Go back to your own lives. When it comes to the inherent nature of the Religion of Peace, there is reflexive uncertainty, which is just comforting denial and submission. As Bill Warner of the Center of Political Islam says in this video, “Muslims expect submission and they get it.” Westerners possess the mentality of a captive victim who on an internal level identifies with his captor and believes he deserves to be abused. The Western mind can no longer summon the will to obtain its freedom.

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