AT The Orthosphere, in an essay titled “Why You Need Traditionalism,” Alan Roebuck poses the question, “How can you escape the nightmare of the contemporary world?”

His response in part:

Know first that you cannot save yourself. You are too small. You need to discover, believe and participate in something larger than yourself, something that connects you with the realities that the contemporary world denies: God, true religion, family, nation, and so on. You need the traditionalism of your people.

Traditionalism is not just adherence to a tradition, for there must be a reason why we adhere to it. More basically, traditionalism is knowing and living in accord with what many thinkers call the order of being. Contemporary thought holds that the world is only a physical realm in which any meaning or order that transcends the physical is arbitrarily projected by man. And since this order is arbitrary, man can change it whenever he wants. But contemporary thought is mistaken. The world contains a God-given order that pre-exists man, and that he knows primarily through intuition, his faculty of knowing basic truths without a process of formal reasoning.

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  GILBERT STUART'S painting of Mrs. Richard Yates (1795), the wife of a New York merchant, is one of the most loved of American portraits. Stuart, highly successful in England and America, is most famous for his unfinished portrait of George Washington and his paintings of five other presidents, but none of his works is superior to this. The greatest portraits aim to show not just beauty or status, but character. On this level, Mrs. Richard Yates, peering up from her needlework, is a triumph. The artist Stan Washburn describes it at his art site: It could be a portrait of a formidable New England matron I observed as a child, one Miss Twitchell (really), a person of vast sternness. She was obviously not the model for this painting, but body and soul it’s just how I remember her. She was a bank teller in Gorham, a small New Hampshire town. That bank was not, as banks are now, an open, welcoming institution. Upon entry you were confronted with a floor-to-ceiling wooden partition with a small, closely-barred window behind which lurked Miss Twitchell. One day a robber came in, stuck the muzzle of a pistol between the bars, and said, “Gimme the money.” “Won’t,” snapped Miss Twitchell, and dropped to the floor, out of sight. The bars were substantial, the door from the lobby to the rear area was locked; there was nothing the robber could do. He fled, empty-handed.

THE Birmingham Metropolitan College in England yesterday lifted its ban on the niqab, the full Islamic face veil, after a student petition collected 8,000 signatures opposed to the restriction and a protest was planned. Here from The Birmingham Mail is the statement by the college, a tour de force of dhimmi public relations:

We are concerned that recent media attention is detracting from our core mission of providing high quality learning. As a consequence, we will modify our policies to allow individuals to wear specific items of personal clothing to reflect their cultural values.

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THERE are several strange facets to Pope Francis’s recent phone call to Anna Romano, a 35-year-old divorced woman in Italy. The woman is pregnant with a child conceived with a married man and the pope offered her only praise. See Margaret Galitzin’s analysis of this latest publicity stunt of the “who-am-I-to-judge” pope.

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ALEX writes:

In one more step in the march to true equality, the Left has identified another group in need of protection and with a potential for enlarging the Democrats’ voter base: less attractive people, who, of course, are discriminated against in all areas of life in favor of more attractive people:

Tentatively, experts are beginning to float possible solutions. Some have proposed legal remedies including designating unattractive people as a protected class, creating affirmative action programs for the homely, or compensating disfigured but otherwise healthy people in personal-injury courts. Others have suggested using technology to help fight the bias, through methods like blind interviews that take attraction out of job selection. There’s promising evidence from psychology that good old-fashioned consciousness-raising has a role to play, too. (more…)

IN a 2006 post at Gates Of Vienna, Baron Bodissey described the Battle of Vienna on September 11, 1683, when the Christian army under Jan Sobieski, the King of Poland, ended the Muslim siege of the city:

It was then, at the last possible moment on the evening of September 11th, that Jan Sobieski arrived at a hill north of the city, leading a force of 40,000 Poles and their German and Austrian allies. The battle began soon afterwards, in the early morning hours of September 12th. (more…)

EVERY DAY, at this time of year, I find one or two crickets in our house. This morning, a dark brown Field Cricket, on the edge of the kitchen sink, waved its comically long antennae, its rear legs poised as always to leap. Who can begrudge a cricket a temporary home? He destroys nothing. He takes nothing, and he chirps with friendly optimism as he sits under the bed or a dresser. In a few weeks, the grass and woods around our home in Pennsylvania will be relatively silent. The throbbing pulse of cricket communication will be gone.

Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist wrote that there are few things on earth more delightful than the sound of crickets. I agree. In his Book of Insects, Fabre wrote: (more…)

AT Big Truth, William Irons writes on the bizarre neologisms that black Americans use to name their children:

The sad fact is that the way black people in America name their children reflects an abandonment of culture, and abandonment of history. However optimistically disingenuous white liberals …. spin it, the reality is that their names have no grounding in a larger coherent culture, and there are not larger truths being passed on to black children by their parents. If anything, they are being taught – on a basic level – that rejection of white Western culture is their cultural ideal, their highest truth. So when young Kanthony asks his mama where his name came from, she just shrugs and says, “Well basically I made it up. At least it ain’t white.”

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  AN ESSAY by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira at Tradition in Action looks at architecture that springs from regional influences. The essay is short, but profound.

OAK NORTON, of Utahns Against Common Core, examines in this video a current language arts textbook for first graders in public schools. The book, published by Zaner-Bloser and recommended by the federal Common Core program, explicitly urges children to become social activists and instructs them how to engage in emotional rhetoric to further collectivist goals. It is truly unashamed political indoctrination. As a commenter at Youtube said, “When I was 6 in Yugoslavia, we had to learn much less about glories of socialism then kids in Utah nowadays.”

At the blog Invisible Serfs Collar, Robin Eubank, a lawyer, writes of the goals of Common Core curricula. Children are to become social change agents. The writer Kenneth Minogue wrote of the advent of “the servile mind.” It can be found at a public school near you.

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BRUCE CHARLTON writes about the rhetorical malfeasance of liberals. As he puts it, “The Left isn’t winning by having good arguments – it wins because people are punished for arguing against the Left.” He continues:

This is one of the things I find most frustrating, and increasingly frustrating: not so much that it happens, but that so many people cannot see that it is happening.

[…]

There have been plenty of examples of coercive repression of opposition, indeed something of the sort is necessary to stable government – yet has there ever before been a situation where so many people are unaware of the coercion, deny the coercion, or think that it doesn’t make any significant difference, or that they personally can easily ‘see through’ the dense cloud of swirling lies which surrounds them?

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Although I oppose U.S. intervention in Syria for any purpose short of retaliation in the event of a direct attack by Syrian forces on American territory or U.S. interests (neither of which has happened, nor is likely), there is still room for nuance in looking at the U.S. government response to what is happening in Syria – and by extension throughout Arab-ruled lands.

One nuance is just whom U.S. intervention would benefit – whether or not it is true that the Assad regime was behind the recent chemical attacks, which still looks to me like a case not proved.

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JAMES P. writes:

In this month’s Air Force Magazine, a letter responding to an editorial about sexual assault in the military observes that this problem is the natural consequence of the destruction of the previous culture. Here is the letter (emphasis added):

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MEN have always outshone women at Harvard Business School. But this past year, a software program was introduced that allowed professors to track grades for men and women separately. Lo and behold, the women started getting better grades. The New York Times describes the sea of feminist flattery and favoritism in which the Harvard female MBA swims. You would think women would be propelled to the top ranks of every company in the world on the currents of so much self-approval, but these currents have yet to reach the required momentum.

In charge of the project to get women faculty and students to perform better (or to be perceived as performing better) is Frances Frei, Harvard Business School’s lesbian du jour. Frei dresses as a man and is “married” to another business celebrity, Anne Morris. Together, these women, who have written a book, say the most stunningly obvious things about company management and yet (could it be their cool lesbianism?) people seem to listen. These two are out of central casting. The postmodern business guru is what would be considered in previous ages a freak.

For another glimpse of the cultural Marxism that prevails at the business school, look at the work of Robin Ely, another of the school’s race and gender commissars. She has produced, among other things, “An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender,” a project in which men on offshore oil platforms were pressured to behave in a less masculine way. From an abstract of the “study:” (more…)

KARL D. writes:

A black male punched out three white people in Manhattan after saying he was “going to knock out the next white person he saw.” One of the victims is a 62-year-old white male who is the sole support for his 92-year-old mother. The blow put him into a coma and he is not expected to live. The NYPDs “hate crime task force” is now on the case.

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KARL D. writes:

Lori Duron, a young mother who has made a living writing, blogging and bragging about raising her two sons in a gender-neutral atmosphere, was taken aback when her ten-year-old son “came out” to her as heterosexual. According to The Daily Mail:

“I’m careful how I phrase things. I ask my oldest son Chase if he thinks anybody in his class is cute. I leave it open so that he can answer honestly,” she wrote in the essay. (more…)

IN the entry on television shows from the 1950s, the reader Joe A. does not agree that it was an era of wholesome entertainment. Joe writes of “Lassie:”

The father is unquestioning to external authority. Be it the town mayor, military officers, policemen, “experts,” Hugh Reilly never fails to submit meekly and obediently. June Lockhart exemplifies a form of “Prairie” or perhaps “Heartland” feminism in which, while outwardly submissive to her husband, she is actually his numinous better and the font of wisdom and correct behavior. This is also one of the first examples of a television family in which the child Timmy, played by Tommy Rettig, often schooled his father and indirectly his mother, on the true importance of a child’s wishes and perspective. Weak father, elevated mother, and a twist on the Noble Savage is a good short description of the unrecognized basis to “Lassie.

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