KAREN writes:

My friend posted on Facebook this article in The New York Times about families “crushed by the cost of child care.” She frequently complains about how our country is not fair to working women because there isn’t enough flexibility in work schedules for working moms. What bothers me most about this article is how many of the women interviewed make next to nothing in income after child care, yet still insist on working. Why not just stay home with your children instead!?! The worst part is the comment about the woman who just wishes she could get back to work and tells the reporter her woes as her two year old “wails in the background,” as if she is being oppressed by her own child!!!! Poor kid probably just wants mommy to get off the phone and take care of her.

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DELBERT BELTON, an 88-year-old World War II veteran, was jumped and savagely beaten outside a Spokane skating rink Wednesday night when he was on his way to play pool at an Eagles Lodge. He died from his injuries this morning, according to KXLY news. Two black teenagers were seen on surveillance cameras and are being sought in connection with the incident. So it appears to have been just another “random” crime in America. Like Christopher Lane, who was shot in the back when he was running, Belton was utterly defenseless and probably had never seen his attackers before.

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WE LIVE in a country that, on the one hand, imposes greater and greater restrictions on the liberties of its citizens, spying on their private communications, frisking them at airports and public events, demanding that they submit constantly to time-consuming and humiliating “security measures.” The purpose of these infringements on basic liberties? Rarely does anyone come out and say it, but the purpose is to prevent violence by Muslims.

On the other hand, we live in a country that freely allows its publicly-funded television network to promote Islam. This week, the three-part “Life of Muhammad,” which was made by Muslims, was aired on PBS. I did not see it, but I have it from a reliable source that it was reverential and assured viewers that Islam is a religion of peace. Every single day the government acts as if Islam is a violent creed, but we are told by our public authorities that Muslim murder and mayhem is no worse than the Inquisition. You know it’s bad when John Esposito, professor of Islamic studies at Georgetown, praises the series as “balanced.” A Los Angeles Times review gives the details:

Interlaced with modern topics, each of the hour-long episodes deals with a portion of the prophet’s life — his early days, his departure from Mecca to Medina, and the later years in which he made peace with Mecca, and established a moral code that became known as Sharia law.

Beginning from a point of essential reverence — there is no questioning of Muhammad’s direct relationship with Allah — “The Life of Muhammad” directly addresses high-stakes issues including the divide between Muslims and Jews, and the medieval nature of Sharia law in a way that is almost painfully balanced. (more…)

  Early American Gardens is a beautiful website filled with interesting history about gardening. I highly recommend it as it includes many delightful posts, such as this brief, but intriguing article about avid women gardeners, including Jane Colden, a serious amateur botanist who catalogued, described and sketched some 400 plants in the 18th century. Much of the gardening done in this country has historically been the work of domestic deadbeats. Interestingly, none of the major feminist texts, which complain sorely about the lack of things to do in a home, mention the extravagantly interesting diversion of gardening. It simply doesn't exist. The feminist lives within four walls, without sun, without vines, without bees or butterflies. The history of all those women who would never have traded their gardens for an office is ignored. Rosalie Stier Calvert lived near Washington, D.C. in the nineteenth century and was an enthusiastic gardener who believed women should consider themselves above the world of politics. Well, Rosalie is not exactly cherished today. In 1807, she wrote: "I see so many women making themselves ridiculous by discussing politics at random without understanding the subject that I am disgusted with all controversy except about flowers! Their culture absorbs me more every day, for as I go out rarely, it is my chief amusement."

UNFORTUNATELY, there is no organization of Catholics, as far as I know, that is explicitly working to combat the errors and distortions of Catholic bishops and activists who are pushing for the current amnesty bill and who in general advocate the dissolution of American sovereignty and identity through overwhelming waves of mass immigration from non-European countries. That there needs to be such an organization, even at this late date, goes without saying, if only to correct those heresies for future generations. Next month, some of the major dioceses will be aggressively pushing the bill, with a coordinated effort on Sunday Sept. 8, that will include homilies from the pulpit. Such homilies will almost certainly involve major misreadings of the Church’s moral teachings, which do not advocate the breaking of laws, theft, the overturning of civil authorities, and the abolition of nations.

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HERE is a very good piece by Simcha Fisher at the National Catholic Register about a gender studies professor who has decided that breastfeeding her son was bad for her family because it gave her an unfair advantage over her husband, who could not develop the same kind of closeness with their son. Fisher writes:

She’s been implanted with all sorts of false sensitivities, which tell her something is wrong — even when everything is, by the standards and instinctive delights developed over the entire course of humanity, going just like it’s supposed to go.

This is what happens when you study gender in isolation, like a bug in a petri dish, rather than approaching it in its natural habitat, which is a world oriented toward something higher than equity: love. Gender is not some kind of evolutionarily developed genetic strain that shifts and transforms according to the demands of society. It’s deeper than that. The day-to-day specifics of gender roles can legitimately shift and change. But when a mother feels guilty for feeling like a mother, then we’ve engineered the kind of problem that causes civilizations to fall.

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  ALL children, or at least most of them, love sitting around a fire. A bonfire is more exciting than a movie or a video game. I recently came across this plan at Mother Earth News for a homemade fire pit that is fairly inexpensive and it seems easy to make. If you have a backyard and young children, this would be a good investment. By the way, you can make great "fire nachos" by putting fresh tomatoes, tortilla chips and shredded cheese in aluminum foil and putting the packet right inside the fire at its edge where you can easily retrieve it after about five minutes of intense heat.  

ALEX writes:

Predictably, the various prominent whites can’t allow themselves – and us – to connect the dots in the murder of Christopher Lane. According to the Herald Sun, it’s the NRA’s fault:

[F]ormer deputy prime minister Tim Fischer has urged Australian tourists to boycott the US in the wake of the shooting murder of the Melbourne baseball star.

Mr Fischer said he was deeply angered by the latest tragedy and said turning our backs on America would help send a stern message about the need for tighter gun control.

Christopher Lane, 22, was randomly gunned down while jogging through the town of Duncan in Oklahoma on Friday afternoon local time. (more…)

ACCORDING TO CBS:

An Australian baseball player out for a jog in an Oklahoma neighborhood was shot and killed last week by three “bored” teenagers who decided to kill someone for fun, police said.

Christopher Lane, who was visiting the town of Duncan where his girlfriend and her family live, had passed a home where the boys were staying and that apparently led to him being gunned down at random, Police Chief Danny Ford said Monday. [emphasis added]

A 17-year-old in the group has given a detailed confession to police, but investigators haven’t found the weapon used in last week’s shooting, Ford said.

Police Chief Danny Ford denies that the killing was “random.” According to the Sidney Morning Herald:

When Chris Lane jogged past three boys on Country Club Road in Duncan, southern Oklahoma, the boys did not see a young man, local police chief Danny Ford says, they saw a target.

“They saw him go by and they said, ‘that’s our target’ and they followed him and they shot him, that’s what he told me,” Chief Ford told Fairfax Media of the conversation police had with the oldest suspect, a 17-year-old boy.

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Homosexualism never sleeps.  Wasn’t sodomy once the “love that dared not speak its name”? Now it is the lust that won’t shut up.

The latest manifestation of the homosexualists’ determination to infest every corner of life, no matter how seemingly trivial, is at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.  The Met is having a Russian opera gala to open its fall season on September 23rd.  And it really is all-Russian: the opera is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, adapted from Alexander Pushkin’s epic poem of the same name; the conductor is Valery Gergiev, artistic director of St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre; and the star is Russian diva Anna Netrebko (who is truly extraordinary, as is Gergiev – even if he’s usually rather disheveled).

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READERS who are not already well-versed in it may be interested in the hot controversy over attacks launched by David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine against Diana West’s new book American Betrayal, about the Communist infiltration of the American government in the 1930s, a book which I cannot comment upon because I haven’t read it. At her site, West has many responses to what appears to amount to vicious denunciation. At Family Security Matters, Michael McCann yesterday wrote:

Why, then the visceral, personal attack on Diana West by Frontpage Mag? The revelations of her powerful narrative seemed to have rocked the boat. (more…)

M.G. at the website Those Who Can See offers various biological explanations for black criminality. He cites the relatively high levels of narcissism, impulsiveness, risk-taking, psychopathology, low intelligence and aggression among blacks on psychological assessments and intelligence tests. The traits he mentions are compelling, observable factors, but they do not fully explain the criminal behavior of blacks.

Let’s put it this way, did Bernie Madoff lie and steal because he was highly intelligent? Did he come up with his Ponzi scheme because he was able shrewdly to control his impulses and had a gift for systematic thinking? Certainly, he couldn’t have pulled off his scam without these innate traits. But that’s not why he stole from others. He defrauded his clients because he wanted their money and he wanted it because of greed, lust and love of self, all of which are deformities of the will, not of the body. Similarly, does a black man rape a woman because he has a strong sexual drive? Certainly, he wouldn’t commit such an abomination without his innate sexual desire, but the sexual drive does not impel him toward an act of hatred and destruction. The will to destroy and hatred in his heart cause him to rape.

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WE live in a society that encourages sin, to the point of denying that sin even exists. We also live in a world of enveloping stupidity. How are these two phenomena related? Read Kristor’s brilliant explanation of how sin makes people stupid at The Orthosphere. Proceeding from the assertion that all sin entails lying, or a denial of reality, Kristor writes:

The maintenance of a small lie sooner or later entails the introduction of another, supporting lie, and this procedure replicates. It’s like a Ponzi scheme. Sooner or later the whole edifice falls over, for lack of support from the real world. Until it does, until the collapse arrives, the cost of doing business goes up and up with the cost of compensating and masking for more and more noise introduced by more and more lies.

The worst state of affairs, however, is not systemic collapse. Systemic collapse is bad, but at least it necessarily prompts a radical reorganization of the system in terms of a more accurate recognition of reality – also known as honesty, truth, righteousness. That can be a most salutary process. But there is always a danger that a sufficiently intelligent, complex and ramified system will evolve around the persistent problem at C so as to hobble along in spite of it. In that case, H will perform less efficiently than it might if there had never been a lie, but because C’s signal is obscured, H will have the impression that everything is just fine.

Of course, many intelligent people are outrageous sinners. Sooner or later, however, sin restricts the functioning of the mind. All of us have experienced this phenomenon.

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IN his most recent article, Bill Warner of the Center for Political Islam wrote that many converts to Islam are attracted to the way of life, but know little about Islamic beliefs. He wrote:

Everybody knows someone who has tried to read the Koran and never finished it. Islam seems like a tropical jungle, deep and complex. But that is not true, since Islam is both Allah and Mohammed.

Allah may be hard to understand, but anybody can understand Mohammed. The reason is simple. We have his official biography (called the Sira) and it is a fascinating, ripping read. After Mohammed is born he soon becomes an orphan. He married and became a successful businessman, then a prophet of Allah. He preached Islam for 13 years and converted 150 Muslims. Next he became a politician and jihadist for his last 10 years. When he died every Arab in Arabia was a Muslim. The Sira has religion, plots, spies, war, torture, secret agents, slavery, sex, jealousy and more. It is one of the world’s great stories. (more…)

KARL D. writes:

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any sicker, behold the movement known as “co-parenting.” How do these men and women (especially the women!) look at themselves in the mirror every morning? This isn’t just selfishness. It is malignant narcissism!! Note that the women in the article were interviewing prospective “fathers” from around the world including a homosexual man! One thing does give me hope though. The majority of commenters on this story are as disgusted by this as you or I.

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