THE brave new world of commercial reproduction creates a welter of interesting stories for journalists. There is never a dull day for the news media as long as the child-production factories, with their sleek labs and carpeted waiting rooms, roll along. Engineering human life is extremely complex and therefore extremely interesting. For instance, Cathy Lynn Grossman, (beaming in the photo above) of USA Today, reported earlier this week on the legal “challenges” involved in the cold-blooded, high-tech market for children. Who will be called a mother when one woman provides the eggs and another the womb? It is extremely complex and therefore extremely interesting. It was as if the beaming Grossman were reporting on the latest exciting app for IPhones. We are told the various legal and commercial maneuvers two homosexual men go through to procure twin girls, with the only drawback being that it is all so complex. She wrote: Read More »

JODI writes:

I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now and quite like what I see. It is refreshing to read common sense for a change. Thank you for your effort to be a light in this dark, ugly world.

I found this image on a friend’s site today. Is it just me or do these men look completely stripped of their manhood? They look so uncomfortable and out of place. Don’t get me wrong, I love when my husband cares for our son. When my son was a small baby like the babes being worn in this picture, there was no way he’d be alone with daddy — I had to nurse him. Now that my son is over a year old he loves to play with dad, but they bond in a much different way than with me.

Read More »

IN his remarkable 1886 book, El Liberalismo es Pecado, or Liberalism is a Sin, the Spanish priest, Fr. Felix Sarda y Salvany addressed the issue of the relatively small number of individuals resisting liberalism. I like what he says very much because it addresses a complaint I hear often: “There are not enough of us.” His book was written for Catholics but is applicable in some of his points to others as well. He wrote:

Among the illusions entertained by a certain class of [anti-liberals], there is none more pitiable than the notion that the truth requires a great number of defenders and friends. To these people, numbers seem a synonym for force. They imagine that to multiply heterogenous quantities is to multiply power. Read More »

MARK MONCRIEFF, from Australia, sends a donation and this note:

I read an article recently in which the author saw a handicapped man and his care-taker on the street and was so overwhelmed with emotion it made him cry. Later on he thought what a hypocrite he was as he had never donated to a charity for the disabled before and didn’t that day either. Read More »

THIS 2008 article by Bruce Charlton is relevant to the recent discussion here of social science studies. The article concerns the scientific world at large, which Charlton describes as rife with “zombie science.” He defines zombie science as the “sinister consequence of evaluating scientific theories purely on the basis of enlightened self-interest.” He writes:

In the real world it looks more like most scientists are quite willing to pursue wrong ideas for so long as they are rewarded with a better chance of achieving more grants, publications and status. Read More »

Muslims at prayer in Paris

TIBERGE at Galliawatch provides a translation of an article on mass immigration in France. From the piece:

Many Frenchmen of European origin feel like foreigners in their own country. In certain neighborhoods, they become an oppressed minority. Foreign customs – the Islamic veil, boubous, djellabas – are forced on them in public areas. Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

The persona of Ann Barnhardt has always grated on me. It always seems aggressive and hyper-masculine, way more manly than any man actually is. When I see her in action I always think, “Why is a woman behaving this way, it should be a man instead, why does this culture always seem to produce aggressive women with men in the shadows?” Well, it seems like Ann Barnhardt completely agrees with me on the incongruity of her role as tax evader and resister. Read More »

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

The Catholic World Report has always struck me as accepting of Vatican II (“properly interpreted,” anyway).  As we’re now at the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II, CWR has devoted its current issue to “Vatican II: Fifty Years Later.” Interestingly, it isn’t all cheerleading.  In one of the articles, Edward Pentin asks, and tries to answer, “Why Did Vatican II Ignore Communism?”

While Mr. Pentin would like to give Pope John XXIII the benefit of the doubt, he is in the end very critical, as are several of those he quotes — among them Roberto de Mattei, of the complete failure of the Council’s participants even to mention, much less condemn, Communism when that most anti-Christian of ideologies was at the peak of its influence. Read More »

FITZGERALD writes:

This post at What Women Never Hear is spot on, especially these first few paragraphs:

[Men and women] differ in so many ways. Women seek emotional fulfillment and they go after it. Men expect sexual fulfillment but they also expect not to have to work hard for it. They will work hard to conquer a woman but not work hard for sex with her afterward. Read More »

IN THE ATLANTIC, Alice Dreger, a professor of “medical humanities” at Northwestern, ponders the findings of two anthropologists who have discovered two African tribes where homosexuality and masturbation are unknown. These tribes present several puzzles to the liberal mind and their ways of life are instructive. Indeed, I would say anthropologists will be studying them for decades, so rich and interesting are the implications.

On the positive side, one of the tribes, who have been studied by the anthropologists Barry and Bonnie Hewlett, is a model of “gender egalitarianism.” Among the Aka, the women sometimes hunt and often “control distribution of resources.” Does that mean giving out bowls of beans? That’s not clear. Whatever it is, if the women control distribution of something important, even bowls of beans, that’s equality in the feminist sense. Read More »

I WAS mostly away from the computer this weekend and was able only to post quickly the entry about the changed University of California logo. When I returned, I found a half a dozen or so comments that captured the significance of this symbol. The comments so perfectly demonstrated the good sense and insight typical of the readers of this site.

I suggested that the logo, which will not replace the traditional symbol on diplomas, is an expression of the “meaningless university.” But obviously it — both the university and the logo — is filled with meaning.

Liberalism rejects pomp and pageantry and so it seems to eschew symbolism itself. And yet it uses its very pretension to un-pretentiousness quite effectively. This anodyne logo, as seemingly inoffensive as a transit authority sign, is as good as a declaration of hostility upon the culture that created the University of California, the culture of the book, the culture of the Christian West.

As Consultus says:

The removal of the book says, “No content here.”

Of course, that’s not right, either. There is content. It’s all Leftist propaganda.

These changes to accommodate PC do not create peace among factions. Typically, they further embolden those who think their own special group is entitled to take offense.

It is similar, as another reader points out, to this other of bit of liberal regalia:

Read More »

INEZ writes:

I thought you and your readers might find this news from my alma mater both interesting and disturbing:

The University of California is changing its seal from its traditional one (bearing the motto, “Let There Be Light”) to a modern monstrosity that looks like a toddler’s drawing on the old Window’s program Paint.

  Read More »

IN THE entry on why studies regarding children raised in homosexual households should be ignored, a commenter provides a lengthy compendium of relevant quotes by G.K. Chesterton. Here is one:

The child is an explanation of the father and mother and the fact that it is a human child is the explanation of the ancient human ties connecting the father and mother. The more human, that is the less bestial, is the child, the more lawful and lasting are the ties. So, far from any progress in culture or the sciences tending to loosen the bond, any such progress must logically tend to tighten it … This triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilisations which disregard it.

DENNIS DALE writes:

I happened upon your post about debating liberal family members and felt compelled to tell my own story.

Recently I drove from Seattle to Southern California with my daughter and her boyfriend — he a committed lefty, she not yet committed (she has her father’s inborn good sense). We were, like Red Riding Hood, bound for Grandma’s house. Grandma, my former mother-in-law, is an old, ill-informed, militant feminist who works as a therapist for the transgendered. She has taken up the cause of homosexuality with religious fervor.

Read More »

St. Nicholas Eve, Richard Brakenburg; 1685

HERE is a detailed description at the St. Nicholas Center of the history and legends surrounding St. Nicholas, who was born in third-century Greece on December 6. The account includes the stories of how this patron saint of children and unmarried women provided the dowry for three poor girls and how he saved a ship from sinking. He is also the patron saint of sailors:

Several stories tell of Nicholas and the sea. When he was young, Nicholas sought the holy by making a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. There as he walked where Jesus walked, he sought to more deeply experience Jesus’ life, passion, and resurrection. Returning by sea, a mighty storm threatened to wreck the ship. Nicholas calmly prayed. The terrified sailors were amazed when the wind and waves suddenly calmed, sparing them all. And so St. Nicholas is the patron of sailors and voyagers.

Read More »

PERFESSER PLUM writes:

Ignore not only studies of same-sex households, but almost all research in the so-called humanities.

I’ve taught at several universities—in sociology and now at a college of teacher deaducation—since 1970. I can tell you that left-leaning, so-called liberal, progressive, “critical” research on family, gender, feminism, social justice, equality, disadvantage, discrimination, achievement gap, and the rest of the assortment of agenda-driven writing is mere propaganda. It is an effort by the self-appointed and self-anointed Gnostics in “liberal” arts and education, and their lesser light (as-yet-untenured) useful idiots, to take over the entire apparatus of how to identify and define societal problems, how to think about problems, and what (the only correct) sorts of solutions there might be. Read More »

A Little Nothing Woman, Arthur Rackham (Courtesy of Art Passions)

There was an old woman

   Called Nothing-at-all,

Who lived in a dwelling

    Exceedingly small:

A man stretched his mouth

    To its utmost extent,

And down at one gulp

    House and old woman went.

(Mother Goose’s Nursery Rhymes, Cupples & Leon Company, 1930)