I KNOW this has already been widely commented upon, but this photo of Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and the Obamas at the Nelson Mandela memorial yesterday says it all, doesn’t it? Here we have the aggressively revealing dress and lack of gravitas of the Western white woman in power along with the inflated egotism of her natural ally, the black man in power. They can’t get enough of each other. Then to top it off, we have the stony demeanor of the wife, whose unhappiness symbolizes the unpleasant reality that the black woman is often the loser in the race to elevate and bring together the white woman and black man. Michelle’s expression reminds me of the antipathy black women feel as more and more white women take their men. — And all this at a memorial service, confirming what has been said here about the death of death.

The Daily Mail also has the now famous photo of Obama, David Cameron and Thorning-Schmidt taking a selfie. These are the Teenagers Who Rule Us.

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THE modern world progressively destroys all vestige of the sacred and turns all ceremonies and rites into vulgar exercises in self-love. The funeral is no exception to this rule. In an egocentric, nihilistic culture, the traditional funeral is too sad, too serious and too impersonal. It’s too much of a downer. That’s why instead of praying for the dead and contemplating the hereafter, survivors now commonly celebrate the life of the deceased with upbeat eulogies, mementoes, biographies, songs, and photos. Chad Bird, in his excellent essay “The Tragic Death of the Funeral,” aptly calls it “necronarcissism.”

Surrounded as it is with so much sincere sentiment and seeming good will, the “Celebration of Life” seems innocuous. But, as Bird writes, this kind of Funeral Lite is a symptom of profound social decay:

What makes community life viable, in groups as small as a family or large as a country, is the will of individuals to makes [sic] sacrifices for others, to consider more than their own needs and wants, and to act accordingly. The more robust this other-focused approach to life is, the healthier the community will be. For that reason, there is no greater threat to the cohesion and perpetuation of a society than narcissism. (more…)

FITZGERALD writes:

I was in college during the anti-apartheid movement. I was in the anti-anti-apartheid movement. We once held a campus-wide meeting where we screened a CBC documentary on the ANC exposing its murderous practices and Soviet underwriting and how the Western and especially American press falsely reported the reality on the ground. It was especially condemning of the Mandelas for advocating violent acts of terror including the practice of necklacing. (more…)

IN celebrating the Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God today, we celebrate not just the purity and sinlessness of a single woman, but her combativeness, the counterpart to her spotless purity. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira wrote of the intransigence of Mary:

Let us look more closely at what intransigence is. When a person has a very clear notion of what is good and an understanding of the highest expressions of this good, this person knows that the opposite is bad. It is not a theoretical knowledge, like that of a scientist who analyzes a specimen in a laboratory, but rather a knowledge that comes hand in hand with a great love for good. The person naturally recognizes the opposite of such good, which is evil, and hates evil with an intensity proportionate to the magnitude of his love for the good.

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  I AM very behind in posting comments on recent threads. I may not be able to get to them all until later today.

TroperA. writes:

The problem regarding Charles’s Dilemma is one facing many people in this day and age: the infiltration of groups —any and all groups, even ones that are not political in nature — by leftists hoping to turn them into engines for “social justice.”  This can be expressed in a maxim called O’Sullivan’s Law:

Any organization or enterprise that is not expressly right wing will become left wing over time.

The Sodahead explains this phenomenon thusly:

One of the reasons for this is leftist intolerance versus right-wing tolerance. Right wingers are willing to hire openly left-wing employees in the interest of fairness. Left-wingers, utterly intolerant, will not allow a non-Liberal near them, and will harass them at every opportunity. The result over time is that conservative enterprises are infiltrated by leftists but leftist enterprises remain the same or get worse.

Also, leftism is in and of itself a form of decay. It’s what happens not just to television shows but to nations, churches and universities as the energy given off by the big bang of their inception slowly ebbs away. Rather than expend vitality in originality and creation they become obsessed with introspection, popularity and lethargy. Leftism is entropy of the spirit and intellect.

Another reason is that the parasitic nature of Liberals/Leftists attracts them to existing money. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

In its race to canonize the late Nelson Mandela before he has even cooled to room temperature (“Nelson Mandela, South African Icon of Peaceful Resistance, Is Dead“), The New York Times shows itself once again to be the natural heir to the Soviet Communist Party’s Pravda.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum, perhaps. But to describe Nelson Mandela as an “Icon of Peaceful Resistance” is to ignore the first half of his life.

There was a reason Nelson Mandela was on Robben Island. Whatever the old Marxist may have been in his later years, in the full flush of his youth he was an active terrorist with plenty of blood, black as well as white, on his hands. (more…)

NATHAN writes:

One of the things Charles wrote in describing a social dilemma in connection with the impending imposition of a homosexual “couple” on his hitherto enjoyable group of oenophiles reminded me of an unpleasant experience I had in 2001. Twelve years later, discord about it lingers with my wife, who believes my sounding off permanently damaged social friendships and probably cost me job opportunities that might have our family in far better financial shape today than we are. She is probably right. The cost of saying what our masters do not want us to hear can be high, if not yet as high as in the Soviet Union. Highly educated Americans — if what elite universities in the United States (American universities no more) offer is “education” — are especially socially programmed, and most are entirely unaware of it.

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    DEBORAH ACUFF writes: As the media and the world begins its commentary upon the death of Nelson Mandela, I would like to recommend the essay "Nelson Mandela and the story of Decius Magius," written by Lawrence Auster in 1990.

  IN ADDITION to Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 and Beethoven's "Egmont" Overture, the distinguished Princeton University Orchestra, which only costs about $60,000 a year for musicians to join, will be performing the "Ballad for Trayvon Martin for Orchestra and Jazz Quintet" at its concert tonight. The ballad is the work of Jazz Professor Anthony Branker, who says Trayvon's death was an act of racial violence. The two-faced professor contends that his composition, obviously born of racial militance, is all about healing. From The Star-Ledger: According to Branker, the work is intended "to be a form of healing and something that could be seen as a composition of hope — one that speaks to all of us to continue to work together so that children of any race, ethnicity or religious affiliation never have to meet such a tragic end." Rather than write from a place of anger, Branker has worked to create a lyrical, peaceful and harmonically beautiful work that incorporates a fugue and Brazilian style. The goal, he said, is to pay tribute to Martin, as well as others who have been victims of racial violence. Yes, I suppose it is a composition of hope: the hope that white guilt will never die. Surely, it implicitly embodies the hope that whites will not wake up one day and say, "Wait a minute. Where are the ballads for the victims of black brutality? What about the hundreds of people raped and murdered…

NEW STATISTICS show that two out of three sodomites infected with HIV continue to have “unprotected sex.” Thus many homosexuals continue to be exposed to a deadly disease by other homosexuals. As the blogger Mundabor writes:

It boggles the mind. It squarely makes of fags the enemy number one of fags, their own willed target for potentially deadly infections. Gaystapo as it breathes and sodomises.

What people still seem not to understand (because they don’t know jack of God, sin, or the devil) is how damaged the soul of an homosexual already is. … [U]nless we understand the gravity of this truly satanical perversion we wil not be able to understand its consequences. Only people firmly in the hand of the devil can be so astonishingly, diabolically self-centred as to put not even their own pleasure, but merely its maximum enjoyment at a premium over other people’s health and perhaps life.

The idea that homosexual culture will ever embrace “unprotected sex” is ludicrous. The culture is based, after all, upon uninhibited sexual indulgence. Don’t you love that bureaucratic phrase: “Unprotected sex?” Every act of anal intercourse is unprotected. Forgive my bluntness, but anal tissues were not designed to be roughed up. They are very different from vaginal tissues. They easily tear, exposing the body to bacteria and viruses. They are in close contact with dangerous bodily wastes. The anus was meant to be an exit way only, not an entryway. The anal passage is homophobic. And nothing can ever be done to change that. Millions of men have died prematurely and suffered all kinds of physical atrocities, including anal cancer, because of violations against this anatomical region. We supposedly live in a medically enlightened age and yet the rudiments of biology are denied every day in The New York Times. The liberal obsesses about secondhand smoke and then applauds the far more unhealthy acts of the sodomite.

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  KARL D. writes: I just came across this article which jibes quite well with your recent posts (here, here and here) on Asians and your reader's suggestion that they are "model immigrants." A Chinese woman in Long Island, New York wants to build an entire gated community (that would cost billions of dollars) specifically for  wealthy Chinese nationals in the Catskill mountains of upstate New York. As you can imagine, the citizens of this tiny community are not exactly thrilled.

FOR the second time, feminists in San Juan, Argentina taunt and attack Catholics protecting the cathedral from vandalism. LifesiteNews has the story.

The [topless] women, many of them topless, spray-painted the men’s crotches and faces and swastikas on their chests and foreheads, using markers to paint their faces with Hitler-like moustaches. They also performed obscene sexual acts in front of them and pushed their breasts onto their faces, all the while shouting “get your rosaries out of our ovaries.”

[…]

After unsuccessfully trying to get into the building, the women burned a human-sized effigy of Pope Francis. “If the pope were a woman, abortion would be legal,” they shouted.

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CHARLES writes:

I am a traditionalist and a fan of your blog.  I find it to to be full of thoughtful and perceptive comments written by learned and thoughtful people.

I am afraid that I will soon be forced to confront a very awkward and uncomfortable social problem of the type frequently discussed in your blog.  I thought that my quandary might be of interest  and that it might be helpful to solicit your views and those of your contributors on the underlying issue and my proposed response to it.

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JEWEL writes:

I wonder as I ponder the wretched state of music in the Church. Here is quite possibly one of the most obnoxious Advent songs ever. We sang it last Sunday in our Novus Ordo church. It was the processional hymn.

Listen and weep.

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IN response to the entry on Chinese women giving birth on American soil, a reader sent the following comment, which was previously published at View from the Right.

Anti-Global Expatriate writes:

Despite all the various historical antipathies between various Asian nations, all Asians feel more kinship with one another than with Westerners or other outsiders.

Yes, the Koreans may hate the Japanese, and the Chinese may hate the Japanese (this perception is actually deliberately exaggerated by the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese governments and business conglomerates in order to confuse the West in trade negotiations and so forth), and the Chinese may think they’re superior to all, but Asians will work together to take advantage of/frustrate the designs of Westerners and other outsiders. (more…)

VENI, REDEMPTOR GENTIUM is an Advent hymn written by St. Ambrose in the fourth century. Below is the 19th-century translation by James Neale, and it shows what great poetry this chant is with its keen perception of the high drama of the Incarnation.

O equal to the Father, Thou!
Gird on Thy fleshly mantle now;
The weakness of our mortal state
With deathless might invigorate.

Thy cradle here shall glitter bright,
And darkness breathe a newer light,
Where endless faith shall shine serene,
And twilight never intervene.

In the video above, a simple version of it is rendered beautifully by Giovanni Vianini.

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  THIS is a view from within the Exhibition Hall of the main conservatory at Longwood Gardens, in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Those are green and red apples floating in water.