A Rooster, Joseph Crawhall

THE VICTORIAN artist Joseph Crawhall of Northumberland specialized in painting animals and birds; his pictures include this remarkably vivid rooster.

French Islamic poster ("Don't touch my prophet")

MUSLIM rioting on the Champs-Elysée, a glowing speech by a French bishop at the inauguration of a new mosque, the closure of a museum dedicated to Joan of Arc in Rouen and the new Islamic exhibit at the Louvre —- the blogger Tiberge at Galliawatch has these and other must-read posts about events in France.

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CYNDI writes:

It isn’t only in cases of divorce and remarriage that a family obituary writer exhibits some serious prejudice. I always thought that the purpose of an obituary was to describe the important aspects of the deceased’s life regardless of whether you liked that person or not. Well, can you beat this:

The mother of a longtime female acquaintance of mine (Lisa) died. I hate to call her a “friend.” Lisa didn’t like her father particularly, who had died a dozen years earlier while married to her mother. Lisa’s dad wasn’t a criminal or a wife- or childbeater. Read More »

NOTICE the happy, warm faces of the “transgendered” freaks, I mean, individuals in the shocking publicity campaign by the Washington, D.C. Human Rights Commission. The point of these ads, ostensibly inspired by brutality toward transgendered individuals, is that men in lipstick, cross-dressers, self-castraters and women who have undergone barbaric mutilations, and physically injured themselves to a degree that almost certainly surpasses the harm any bullies who have threatened them have inflicted, are very nice people. Only a bigot would turn against such warmth. “You are a hater,” the posters seem to say, “if you object.”

I’m sure some of these confused individuals are very nice.

But these male women and female men, for all their smiles and friendliness, are part of an aggressive, bullying movement that is not warm and cuddly. It seeks to force-feed us with demonic confusion and ultimately it demonstrates disregard for the individuals it showcases. It doesn’t effectively care if these individuals are victimized because if it did it would encourage them at least to be discreet with their psychological disorientation and help them work toward being normal, which would be the greatest protection against any victimization.

Bureaucratic tyranny, as James Kalb put it, imposes softly and with smile. If it were brutal, how much easier it would be to spot the enemy. Its success in making the real victims seem like bullies and Nazis makes it an overwhelming force for evil.

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THE Daily Mail reports:

A British soldier who did not know she was pregnant has given birth on the frontline.

The woman had a son in Camp Bastion on Tuesday – just days after the Taliban launched a deadly attack on the UK’s main base in Helmand.

The baby was born five weeks premature. Last night both mother and child were said to be doing well.

A ‘specialist paediatric retrieval team’ from the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford will travel to Afghanistan in the next few days to provide care for the soldier and her son on their RAF flight home.

What was the response of the British military brass? Do they suddenly realize in a flash how deeply immoral it is to have women as soldiers? No. They instead conclude that it may be necessary that all female soldiers have pregnancy testing before they are deployed. Add one more costly intervention to support the radical, inhuman project of an egalitarian military. How long before we see soldiers with baby carriers? A senior “Army insider” was quoted as saying:

The baby’s successful delivery is a wonderful testament to the outstanding job the medics do here. It shows how they can use their extraordinary skills to turn their hands from saving lives to delivering babies.

 —– Comments —-

Jeanette V. writes:

Here’s the perfect baby sling for that female warrior.

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THE fast food company has announced it will re-evaluate its donations to organizations that are against same-sex marriage and that it will include “sexual orientation” in its anti-discrimination hiring policy. Read about it here.

If you’ve developed a taste for fried chicken patties, get over it.

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IN THIS previous post on UFOs, Alan responds to commenters who suggest there is credible evidence that objects seen in the sky have been spaceships from other planets. He writes:

FITZGERALD writes:

I came upon this recent Forbes piece by a Meghan Casserly who covers “the juggle of work, life and play for smart, ambitious women.” It’s about smart, ambitious women dropping out of the workforce to be smart, ambitious mothers. From the piece:

“No feminist voice can or should make a woman feel bad for the decision to choose family over career.”

Feel bad? Oh my, that’s terrible. Are women that shallow and impressionable that they must have society endorse all of their whims and fantasies and not make them “feel bad” for their precious choices? Read More »

THE Washington, D.C. Office of Human Rights has launched a campaign promoting sensitivity toward the transgendered, “the first government-sponsored campaign in the country to focus on the treatment of transgender and gender non-conforming communities,” according to the New York Daily News. 

The print ads portray “gender non-conforming communities,” or the sad and perverted process of pretending to be the opposite sex, as cool and exciting, and caution people to treat the transgendered with “courtesy and respect.”

At the same time, the school district of Cranston, Rhode Island has decided to prohibit its father-daughter dances.  A single mother complained through the ACLU that the events were discriminatory because not every child has a father to attend.

Under liberalism, the low must be exalted and the high debased. And the distinctiveness of the sexes must be constantly denied. We are all part of a gender non-conforming community now.

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JAMES P. writes:

The Daily Mail reports that the Army has developed a new type of body armor for women. I am reminded of the old Secret deodorant ad — “strong enough for a man, made for a woman.”

Of course, that armor won’t help them when their Afghan “colleagues” shoot them after they remove their body armor…

A FEMALE  Air Force sergeant and the mother of two children allegedly had her husband shoot her twice in the legs last week to avoid a military deployment to Asia. According to the Associated Press:

Police say 25-year-old Judy Groomes was treated for wounds on both of her legs from one round from a handgun fired by her husband, 26-year-old Christopher Tyquan Groomes. Both are active military based at nearby Barksdale Air Force Base.

Groomes allegedly claimed an intruder shot her early Friday while her husband and two children slept. But police say she convinced her husband to shoot her to avoid military service.

Groomes, below, is white and her husband is black. Here is a slightly longer version of the story at The Daily Mail. None of the newspaper accounts of this highly implausible story say how the police know that Judy Groomes induced her husband to shoot her.

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CARDINAL TIMOTHY DOLAN’s appearance Friday at Fordham University with the comedian Stephen Colbert was one more public humiliation of the Church by the grovelingly buffoonish Archbishop of New York. You know it was bad when the New York Times describes the event as “the most successful Roman Catholic youth evangelization event since Pope John Paul II last appeared at World Youth Day.”

Colbert, who calls himself Catholic, said to the Cardinal at one point: “So many Christian leaders spread hatred, especially of homosexuals. How can you maintain your joy?”

According to the Times,“Cardinal Dolan responded with two meandering anecdotes — one about having met this week with Muslim leaders, and another about encountering demonstrators outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”

Laurie Goldstein reports, “Mr. Colbert’s response was quick and unequivocal. ‘If someone spreads hate,’ he said, ‘then they’re not your religious leader.'”

At the Remnant, Christopher A Ferrara has a blistering appraisal of the Cardinal’s invitation to Barack Obama to the Al Smith Dinner on Oct. 18. The invitation, he writes, “demonstrates the total surrender of the Catholic Church to the Zeitgeist and the powers that be in America.”

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Brad C. writes:

No reference to Cardinal Dolan is complete without an accompanying photo of the “Cheesehead” vestments.

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DANIEL S. writes:

Ufology has long been a favorite topic of mine. In my teenager years I had a near obsession with the subject, devouring every book and TV documentary I could find on UFOs, abductions, and conspiracy theories. I read everything from Whitley Strieber’s famous book Communion to William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (in which he offers the theory of an alien takeover of Earth in league with the Illuminati, which he later rejected declaring the notion of an alien takeover a false flag for the New World Order). In my own time I have witnessed UFOs, though I always shied away from specifically defining what I had seen, not knowing whether I had seen something natural or supernatural in the night sky.

In recent years I had left the topic on the back burner of my spiritual and intellectual pursuits, but a year or so back had my interest renewed after reading Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Father Seraphim Rose and The System of the Antichrist by Charles Upton, a disciple of the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon. Read More »

ROBERT FROST’S 1916 poem “Out, Out” is the sad and moving story of the death of a farm boy. It was based on a real life occurrence. According to Jay Parini’s biography, Robert Frost, A Life, the following obituary appeared in the Littleton Courier on March 31, 1910. The boy was a neighbor of Frost’s in New Hampshire:

Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, one of the twin sons of Michael G. and Margaret Fitzgerald of Bethlehem, died at his home Thursday afternoon, March 24, as a result of an accident by which one of his hands was badly hurt in a sawing machine. The young man was assisting in sawing up some wood in his own dooryard with a sawing machine and accidentally hit the loose pulley, causing the saw to descend upon his hand, cutting and lacerating it badly. Raymond was taken into the house and a physician was immediately summoned, but he died very suddenly from the effects of shock, which produced heart failure.

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ALEXANDRA writes:

After enjoying your blog for some time and learning a great deal from you and your readers and commenters, I am pleased to have relevant experience to share with regard to the recent entry on divorced spouses in the obituaries.  I worked at a daily newspaper in a medium-sized city (population 175,000) for five years.  During most of that time, I worked the obituary desk.

About a quarter of the time, a family member would prepare something. Read More »

IN THIS interesting entry about interracial marriage and the movie Mississippi Masala, the reader Jane. S. described the racial dynamics in the film. She used the phrase, “race trumps everything” to explain the end result of the interactions between the movie’s African blacks and Indians. A reader was very upset by this particular comment. She interpreted it in a literal way to mean that there are no human loyalties or obligations that transcend race.

Jane, who was once married to a man from a different race, now explains her meaning, which was that race often trumps the very best intentions in marriage. She writes:

Mrs. Campbell seems quite upset about the phrase “race trumps everything” and wants to know what I mean by that. To be honest, I don’t know precisely, so I’ll go back to the place where I first used it.

The Indian attorney in Mississippi Masala is born and raised in Uganda, and considers it his beloved homeland; he spends his entire life in good relations with blacks, he has a black friend he loves like a brother. All that goes out the window in a heartbeat, and he and his family are deported, just because of their race. He is afraid that his daughter may find herself in a similar circumstance, if she marries a guy from another race. There is no point in saying things like that don’t happen; they already have. Read More »

MORE COMMENTS have been added to this entry about the efforts of a young black man to find a wife. Also, in that thread, I emphatically reject a statement made by a commenter yesterday that black women are “sexually unappealing to men of all races.” I unfortunately scanned over that comment when it was first posted yesterday. It is an incomprehensible and clearly false statement given the procreative record of black women, not to mention their objective physical qualities. It is also mean-spirited.

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ALAN writes:

The Thinking Housewife is being taken for a ride by flying saucer advocates and UFO believers. I do not “imply” that flying saucers do not exist. I assert flatly that they do exist. They are as real as rainbows and just as insubstantial.

Decades ago, when I was an amateur astronomer, I studied the Saucer Myth at great length. I read all the books and stood with people on hilltops as they pointed at stars, planets, and aircraft lights and called them “UFOs.” I attended dozens of lectures and spoke with UFO “experts” like Dr. J. Allen Hynek. For a while, I gave them the benefit of the doubt on the chance that a substantive mystery might exist.

However, years passed and no one produced a shred of evidence to support that idea. I became a UFO skeptic because I discovered there is nothing there but storytelling, anecdotes, mis-identification of ordinary objects, hoaxes, tall tales, and sensational journalism. The UFO Myth is worth studying for those reasons, but not because Aliens are flying around in super-advanced Spaceships. (And UFO advocates would have us believe that those Aliens who build and fly sleek spaceships across interstellar space were so inept as to permit one of their Saucers to conk out and crash in the New Mexico desert in 1947. That is hilarious. But it is the kind of colorful story that sells books and generates tourism dollars.) Read More »