IN A piece at The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau describes the British author H.G. Wells’s observations on the dictators of the twentieth century. Of particular interest is the description of Wells’s interview with Stalin. Mr. Bertonneau writes:

Stalin in Wells’ eyes was a “lonely overbearing man… damned disagreeable,” and yet possessed of “an intelligence far beyond dogmatism.” In The Experiment, the description of the interview goes on for eight pages (684 – 691). Read More »

THE DAY before the election, I wrote:

Romney’s Mormonism, in my opinion, is an aspect of his shallowness and also of his loyalty to his family.

On Sunday, Lawrence Auster explained this more fully: Read More »

MARY writes:

If I were like Inez – a young, very bright, athletic go-getter marrying a guy with a trust fund big enough to support us comfortably for life – I know exactly what I would do. I would finish up my law degree from the Top Ten school. Just because. Then I would marry the Trust Fund Guy. Then I would promptly move to the country with TFG, buying a big piece of land with a big old rambling house and some chickens and horses and dogs and maybe a cow or two. Read More »

RUTH BADER GINSBURG said during a public appearance the other day that equality for women will be achieved when there are nine female justices on the Supreme Court. In other words (for all those who still hadn’t gotten the message), it isn’t really about equality after all.

Good enough. Let the dreams of this wizened, man-hating revolutionary come to pass. Let there be nine women on the Supreme Court. I nominate Whoopi Goldberg as Chief Justice. Let all the women on The View get a chance. The court wouldn’t be much more of an outrage to justice than it is now. Let it go.

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EARLIER this year, Capt. Kate Petronio of the Marine Corps made news when she wrote in the Marine Corps Gazette that women are not up to combat tours and overwhelmingly do not wish to serve on front lines. She said she herself had been rendered infertile by the physical stress of her experience in combat operations in Iraq. However, according to The Washington Times, Petronio was five months pregnant when the article appeared and she had a baby in October. Her article didn’t say she had been made permanently infertile, but it did leave that impression. I wrote about it here.

Petronio is in the news again because only two women signed up for the much-discussed Marines Infantry Officer Course that was opened to women for the first time in September. Neither of the two women made it through the grueling course. Female officers pushing a greater role for women in combat are angry with the results. They say possible recruits were scared off by Petronio’s story and that women weren’t attracted to the training course because they cannot serve in infantry positions anyway.

Petronio had argued that most military women have no interest in combat positions. She wrote: Read More »

BELOW are excellent comments that came in today on the previous entry about a feminist law student pondering her future. The young woman, Inez, who attends a “Top Ten law school,” plans to have children but hopes to spend little time with them because she suspects she is not talented at that kind of thing. Even though she doesn’t need to work for a living, she prefers to do rather than be swept up into something as passive, emotional and feminine as motherhood. Her husband, she says, will drop their offspring off at school.

I’m posting the new comments here because they deserve their own entry.

Karen I. writes:

Inez is very young and she is still sorting things out. Actually, she isn’t all that young, as many women in previous generations were married with children by her age. But, she is young by today’s standards. By today’s standards, she has a decade to ponder things before she has a child. She has time to get an important degree, and then a time-consuming job. She has time to accumulate marriage proposals, and turn them down. Her bragging about them is a bit unsavory, but she can do that if she wishes as well. She even has time to visit websites like The Thinking Housewife that promote a very different lifestyle than the one Inez is considering, just to post politely disagreeable things. Read More »

INEZ writes:

I’ve read your blog with interest over the last several months. You can call me your loyal (hopefully respectful) opposition. I’m perfectly willing to grant that many of the principles you articulate about masculinity and femininity are true across large numbers of people, and I oppose a great number of modern feminist tropes. However, both my natural inclinations/strengths and my admittedly short experiences have been the opposite of what you would consider feminine.

In your entry “Male and Female, Summarized” you list masculine and feminine qualities. Of the masculine, I strongly fulfill all except sexual conquest, physical strength (relative to men, of course), and naturally, genius, although I doubt that most men possess this quality either! [Let’s leave aside for a moment the technical meaning of PATER-nalism and how I cannot possibly be paternal by definition, not being a man, and replace it for now with “protectiveness.”] Read More »

AT Galliawatch, Tiberge reports on the aftermath of the violent and obscene protest by feminists during a Paris march against homosexual “marriage.” She writes:

Jacques Bompard, mayor of Orange and deputy in the National Assembly, who participated in the Civitas march has described what happened on Sunday, as the rally was getting started:

“The extremists of Femen violently attacked the rally, spraying the demonstrators, including children in carriages and the security personnel, with fire extinguishers,” insists the deputy. Worse, the Ukrainian militants from Femen were “naked with anti-Christian and obscene slogans on their chests, shouting in front of young children,” he wrote in his communiqué. “Contrary to what government spokeswoman Mme Vallaud-Belkacem affirms, the provocations and the calls to hatred came from the aggressors and not from the demonstrators,” he added, condemning the attack “perpetrated by extreme-left-wing militants that belong to an activist fringe group.”

See the amazing video (be warned: it contains obscene footage) of the feminists from Femen aggressively shouting and then screaming like little girls when the crowd reacts to their attack with fire extinguishers.

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THE Church of England’s rejection of female bishops has dealt a devastating blow to the future of liturgical vestments. We’re going to see far less innovation in the years ahead. Just when things were finally getting interesting too.

ERVEN PARK has an interesting piece at Tradition in Action on the high prevalence of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood. He blames this on the failure of bishops to adhere to longstanding prohibitions against men with homosexual inclinations and on the natural attraction of the priesthood to homosexual narcissists. He makes persuasive points. However, he seems to be missing a major factor.

It’s not surprising if few men secure in their manliness are attracted to the heavily sentimentalized environment of a contemporary Catholic parish, where they will be raised up on eagle’s wings, to paraphrase the popular Catholic hymn, on the emotional, personalist liturgy of Vatican II. The figures on homosexuality in the priesthood are probably skewed by the general decline in male vocations. The feminization of the Church inevitably leads to effeminate priests.

A READER writes:

I appreciated that Thanksgiving essay, articulating the value and love of tradition (though the family’s consumption of pies, pastries, candies, and soda pop left me concerned about blood-sugar levels). It came just in time, as we drive past overcrowded shopping malls and homes with garish displays of holiday lights and inflatable Santa scenes already disturbing the peaceful night. Carols have been replaced by Irving Berlin tunes. (No matter; no one knows how to sing anymore.) Christmas, the religious holiday, finally has been eclipsed by the Winter Retail Holiday. I’m sure the Homo economicus elite is pleased.

I don’t know if you remember that scene in the movie, Gandhi, where Gandhi sits alone at his spinning wheel, the breeze gently unfurling his flag and slapping its clips against the flagpole. The sense of isolation was overwhelming. That’s akin to how we feel at Christmastime.

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JLG writes:

A few excerpts from Lisa Bingham’s column, “Bless Your Heart,” from the Syracuse (Utah) Islander for Thursday, 22 November, 2012. I think she hit this one out of the park (to use an image from a sport I never watch)

Thanksgiving is my FAVORITE! it didn’t used to be so—I mean sure, as a child I loved to sing about the great, big turkey down on Grandpa’s farm, but mostly it was just a blip on the radar screen between Happy Halloween and Merry Christmas. Read More »

HERE from the League of the South, a secessionist organization, is the case for making Alabama a separate country. The piece states, “It is time we Alabamians ruled ourselves. We have everything we need . . . if we can merely muster the will.” It begins:

Like many other States of this once-voluntary union, Alabama has all that is necessary to be a separate, independent republic. Our State’s population is 4.8 million (2010 US Census), which puts it equal to or larger than Norway, New Zealand, Croatia, Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, and Iceland, among others. In total area (roughly 50,000 square miles) it is equal to or larger than Slovakia, Estonia, Denmark, The Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Israel, and Taiwan. It is a land of great diversity, from its resource-rich mountains in the north, to its luxuriant Black Belt farmlands, to its beautiful Gulf Coast. Alabama’s enormous natural resources range from timber and other forest products to the ingredients for steel production—coal, iron ore, and limestone. Read More »

A Pennsylvania German reward of merit, 1810-1830

IN THE Danish author Isak Dinesan’s short story, “Babette’s Feast,” the story upon which the well-known and remarkably faithful 1987 movie of the same name is based, General Loewenhielm rises at the end of the spectacular feast that Babette, the former French chef, has prepared in the rustic, ascetic home of the two pious Lutheran sisters who took Babette in as a servant after she fled revolution and the events of Bloody Week in France. Loewenhielm is deeply moved and wants to deliver a toast. The meal, so improbable and sublime, has profoundly affected him.

It has affected the other guests too. The elderly religious friends of Martine and Philippa are unaccustomed to sensual pleasures of this kind. They normally dine on simple fare such as split cod and bread-and-ale soup. They had been alarmed as Babette prepared for the feast, which was to be in honor of the ladies’ deceased father, the leader and prophet of their sect. They had wondered if Babette intended to use the beasts and various herbs in the kitchen to bewitch them. Instead, under the influence of Blinis Demidoff, Cailles en Sarcophage and Veuve Clicquot, they experience a joy and delight they had rarely, if ever, known. They are rejuvenated and their various enmities magically evaporate. Instead of being bewitched, they are filled with a child-like innocence and purity. They laugh under the effects of this mysterious convergence of spiritual and bodily forces.

But for the worldly Loewenhielm, the decorated military figure who counts the queen herself among his friends, the feast has a clear philosophical meaning. He had been suffering in recent days with thoughts of the emptiness and vanity of his life, of the successful career he had built beyond Berlevaag, the Norwegian coastal village where the meal takes place.

Under the influence of Babette’s meal, his disquiet and self-recriminations dissolve. He has a revelation: No matter what course he had taken in life, God’s grace would have been awaiting him.

Here is his toast before the gathered guests as told in the story:

“Man, my friends,” said General Loewenhielm, “is frail and foolish. We have all of us been told that grace is to be found in the universe. But in our human foolishness and short-sightedness we imagine divine grace to be finite. For this reason we tremble …” Never till now had the General stated that he trembled; he was genuinely surprised and even shocked at hearing his own voice proclaim the fact. “We tremble before making our choice in life, and after having made it again tremble in fear of having chosen wrong. But the moment comes when our eyes are opened, and we see and realize that grace is infinite. Grace, my friends, demands nothing from us but that we shall await it with confidence and acknowledge it in gratitude. Grace, brothers, makes no conditions and singles out none of us in particular; grace takes us all to its bosom and proclaims general amnesty. See! that which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us. Ay, that which we have rejected is poured upon us abundantly. For mercy and truth have met together and righteousness and bliss have kissed one another!”

IN THE entry about the demonstrating French feminists who cursed Christianity and opponents of homosexual “marriage,” Daniel S. writes:

With Christianity gone from the public square and from the hearts of most Frenchmen, an old enemy has returned. Islam is now set to surpass Catholicism as the dominant religion in France. The hedonistic nihilism of the decadent, spoiled bourgeoisie will naturally crumble before the soldiers of Allah that now populate large portions of France. It might be boobs for these spoiled children today, still playing out their silly rebellions against any father figure, but it will be burqas tomorrow when the Muslims, with their eternal will power, assume the upper hand.

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AT The Orthosphere, Kristor offers a reasonable guide to survival and affecting the culture. In the immediate future, he recommends:

1. Resolve to pay no more PC jizya (beautifully spelled out in the Solzhenitsyn essay that has been discussed a lot lately in the wider orthosphere). Tell the truth, and call a spade a spade: calmly, politely, and without being obstreperous about it, but nevertheless firmly. Without making a big deal about it or calling attention to yourself, fail to appear for the public rites of Moloch. If you must thus appear, quietly fail to meet the requirements of the rite. Read More »

TIBERGE at Galliawatch has another must-read post on one of the recent demonstrations against same-sex unions in France. She writes:

Nude women, part of the “Femen” group disrupted the march and sprayed the demonstrators with tear gas. Their naked torsos were painted with blasphemous slogans such as “F… God”, “F… Church” and “In gay we trust” (photos below).

These obscene paid “professionals” were supported and seconded by a well-known French “journalist” and militant lesbian named Caroline Fourest, who had already demonstrated in favor of gay marriage on Saturday and had been pushed back by the police.

Read More »