December 22, 2012
THE IOWA Supreme Court has upheld a dentist’s decision to fire his assistant because she was highly attractive and wore tight, revealing clothing. The dentist claimed that working alongside the asssistant was a threat to his marriage.
December 22, 2012
ROGER G. writes:
Ilana Mercer expresses what I have been feeling about the public grieving for the victims of Sandy Hook, but have not been able to put into words:
“The pornography of public grief in our country is almost as warped as the evil (not ill), mother-slaying, mass murderer responsible for the Sandy Hook carnage. There is very little dignity in the freaky spectacle of mass contagion – where members of the public turn professional mourners, flock to memorial happenings for victims they never knew …
“The victims of killer Adam Lanza have become a sideshow …. Tragedy is denuded of any dignity, reduced to a showy public affair…”
December 21, 2012
Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins in A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen
HENRIK IBSEN’S famous play A Doll’s House, which premiered in Copenhagen in 1879 and has been staged many thousands of times since, is a now classic statement of modern divorce. We will never know how many women have been inspired or encouraged to leave their husbands by Nora Helmer, Ibsen’s lovely and effervescent housewife who slams the door behind her when she leaves her home two days after Christmas, but we can assume that the immense popularity of this character in the ensuing years has had personal and grave consequences for some.
The play opens on Christmas Eve.
Nora Helmer returns to her comfortable and cozy Norwegian home after shopping for presents for her three children and her husband, Torvald. She is excited and happy. For the first time in years, she has felt free to spend at Christmastime. Her husband has a new job at a bank and, with this good fortune, they are likely to be comfortable for many years. Torvald is in the next room and soon comes out to greet her. He likes to tease her and call her his “little lark” and his “squirrel.” He finds his wife enchanting but also treats her like a child, a habit which she fully encourages. The moralistic Torvald is what people refer to today as a “control freak.” He even attempts to regulate what his wife eats. In contrast, Nora is sweet and charming. Read More »
December 21, 2012
JANE S. writes:
The best classical music station in the world, KDFC in San Francisco, has a special program every year for the holidays. Starting at noon on December 24th, they play Christmas music for 36 hours straight. They pause to announce the station every now and then but other than that, it is nonstop. I don’t think they repeat any of the selections. They play stuff you’ve never heard before, like medieval French Christmas carols and the like. It is absolutely out of this world. I just thought I’d pass that along, since it’s one of my favorite things.
Merry Christmas!
December 21, 2012
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
From my employer, SUNY Oswego, I receive only “holiday” greetings. From my remote colleague at the University of Tehran, where I have supervised a dissertation, I receive honest-to-God Christmas greetings. I have also received Christmas greetings from the student whose dissertation I oversaw. She, like the colleague, is Muslim. Truly the world is standing on its head.
December 20, 2012
IN THE ongoing discussion of antidepressants and violence, Zippy Catholic, who has also commented on the issue here, writes:
As for myself, although I’ve never been on psychotropic drugs, I’ve personally seen people who were not violent or suicidal become violent and suicidal on SSRI’s, and then lose those characteristics when carefully weaned off of them. Read More »
December 20, 2012
DON VINCENZO writes:
Robert Bork died yesterday. The nation has lost a great patriot, towering jurisprudential intellect, and devoted Christian.
I met him only once, but during our extended conversation (at an airport where we were awaiting boarding of a delayed flight), I came to realize that, to quote the Bard, Judge Bork’s qualities were such that:
Whenever the bright sun of heaven shall shine,
His honor and the greatness of his name, shall be…
Requiescat in pace.
December 20, 2012
HENRY McCULLOCH writes:
Not content to destroy the armed forces of every Western nation, subvert all of the churches in every Western nation, shut down worthy boys’ and mens’ sports teams nationwide, and distort news reporting and entertainment everywhere by imposing their bizarre worldview and slate of grievances, feminists now train their sights on one of the few remaining institutions in the West that so far had seemed free of their depradations: the Church of Latter-Day Saints.
As The New York Times reports, Mormon women of the feminist persuasion are expressing their desire to change their church to be more accommodating of women by wearing pants to church. Read More »
December 20, 2012
IN AN essay posted at Tradition in Action, the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira examined nativity scenes by 17th-century Portuguese artists. He wrote:
At a first glance, [a scene by the sculptor Joaquim Machado de Castro] might create an impression of disorder in some observers. We are accustomed to the disciplined and soulless crowds of large modern cities, the masses who file silently into movie theaters or grimly and hurriedly cross the streets when a traffic light or policeman’s whistle stops the flow of cars to let them pass. These crowds have become so soulless and standardized that at huge public gatherings they applaud as if they were one huge entity, in which the individual personalities were dissolved like drops of water in the ocean.
December 20, 2012
OATH KEEPERS has offered to provide free self-defense and firearms training to school teachers and administrators. Stewart Rhodes, the organization’s founder, writes:
Children deserve to be defended. And the teachers and staff who are responsible for children during the school day deserve to know how to defend them – effectively, decisively, and at the very outset of an attack. And they deserve a fighting chance to defend themselves as well. It is not enough to tell them to sit tight and wait for the police to arrive. All too often, by the time the police get there, it is too late.
Teachers and school administrative staff need the tools and training to put a stop to the killing themselves.
December 20, 2012
IN THIS previous entry on Adam Lanza, Perfesser Plum writes:
Take everything evil in human history, every iconic villain, every sin and character defect of our mournful species; squeeze them into one body and soul, and you get the modern mass killer of children in the guise of a young adult. Read More »
December 19, 2012
A READER from Hillsdale, Michigan sends a Christmas note. He writes:
It is a joy to be able to offer a contribution to The Thinking Housewife, a site which is itself a joy. Change is constant, but as a society we seem to have surrendered to change and lost the ability to retain those “permanent things” spoken of by Russell Kirk, instead descending into a nihilism worthy of Nietszche’s statement “without God, all things are possible.” The Thinking Housewife has been a journey back to normalcy, taking into account changing times, and a vehicle which regularly inspires me to recommend it to people.
December 19, 2012
THE DISCUSSION of the role of psychotropic medications in the increased incidence of mass shootings continues. A reader cites this article by Peter R. Breggin in the International Journal of Risk and Safety in Medicine. [Note: Another reader takes strong exception to Breggin’s work. See below.] Breggin wrote:
All antidepressants cause mania and mania is an acknowledged adverse effect in the FDA-approved label of all antidepressants. Preda et al. [66] carried out a retrospective study of 533 psychiatric hospital admissions over a fourteen month period and found that 43 (8.1%) could be attributed to antidepressant- induced mania and/or psychosis. Read More »
December 19, 2012
TERRY MORRIS writes:
Everything you and your commenters have mentioned as factors in the Adam Lanza case all involve one, inescapable fact: parental neglect. All of it, including the drugs, the violent video game playing, and the issue of protecting him from negative consequences of his own misbehavior involve parental neglect.
As to the last in that list, watch a few documentaries about famous American serial killers and you will see that this is very common among them – their parents were always running interference for them everytime they got themselves into the slightest trouble with authorities as children, and even into adulthood. But I’m one of those no-nonsense kinds of parents who believe with all my being that even so-called “child safety locks” – those gadgets many, many parents mindlessly place on their lower cabinet doors to prohibit their children from getting into them – are, ultimately, psychologically damaging to children.
Jill Farris in the previous entry makes good points about Lanza’s upbringing that are worth repeating here: Read More »
December 19, 2012
THIS photo, posted and discussed at Galliawatch, shows a French child holding an obscene sign in favor of homosexual “marriage.” This child’s participation in the rally, and the fact that the demonstrators find it entertaining, says much about the cause this rally espouses.
At root, homosexual “marriage” is an enemy of childhood innocence. Amid all the talk of love is callousness and scorn for the child. Whoever is in charge of this boy’s life should be thrown in prison.
December 19, 2012
DON VINCENZO writes:
Who can be legitimately called a saint amongst us? What is a saint? How does the non-saint know when he is in the presence of one given the full measure of God’s grace? Does the saint openly radiate that grace, because in the last analysis, Catholics know – or should – that only God can make a saint?
Michael Gerson, a columnist at The Washington Post, wrote of the recent vote by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to advance the cause of Dorothy Day’s claim to sainthood. It is an interesting column about an interesting woman, but I am reminded of the Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. Read More »
December 18, 2012
JESSE POWELL restates the rationale for chivalry in an age of feminism here. As he puts it, the abuses of feminism do not justify a rejection of masculine protectiveness, a rejection that is so often advocated by men’s rights advocates.
