August 14, 2012
HERE IS another example of fraktur, the Pennsylvania German folk art that included colorful, handmade renditions of important documents, usually marriage and birth certificates, house blessings and bookplates. This is a “Reward of Merit” given to a student by a teacher in about 1830.
August 14, 2012
A READER sent the photos below, one of herself when, as she put it, she was divorced and accepted feminist views of life, and the other when she was pregnant, married and had come to reject her former opinions. There is a striking difference, aside from the obvious change in her hair. The second photo lacks the hard edge and toughness of the first.
August 13, 2012
Robert Montgomery and Carole Lombard in Mr. and Mrs. Smith
FITZGERALD writes:
I happened to watch a few old movies this weekend, and after having watched My Man Godfrey, which I highly recommend, I was intrigued to see Carole Lombard in a not-quite-so inane role. Consequently, I watched Mr. and Mrs. Smith with her, Robert Montgomery, Jack Carson and a few others. Interestingly, this movie, a fairly decent but unconventional romantic comedy, was directed by Alfred Hitchcock apparently as a favor to Carole Lombard as the original director abandoned the project. Nonetheless, it’s definitely not standard “Hitch” movie, although he does appear briefly typical fashion in a scene directed by Miss Lombard. Read More »
August 13, 2012
Miuccia Prada at the Metropolitan Museum
KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT writes:
I read a little while ago your post on a feminist ranting against feminine beauty.
Beauty is a hard concept to “analyze” and to “deconstruct” as leftists love to do. It is an ethereal presence. We react to beauty rather than coldly observe it. We have to admit it is there in some things, probably not in us, and thus we realize it is some kind of favored state (it is clear that beautiful people, and babies, are treated better than ordinary people). At our best, we are humbled by beauty.
This hierarchy of beauty is what grates liberals and leftists.
I’ve written several (many) blogs on beauty, and I’ve noticed that there is an even more vicious war going on against beauty than when I started my blog a few years ago. This time, I think people are well-versed on how to attack beauty, and how to make beautiful people, things, etc. feel they’re wrong (and evil). Decades (even centuries, if you look back at the origins of modernism) have made such people adept attackers of beauty.
I wrote this post on Miuccia Prada’s really ugly clothes after I saw the exhibition “Schiaparelli & Prada, Impossible Conversations” at the Metropolitan Museum. Read More »
August 13, 2012
WHAT DOES the promotion of an open lesbian to the higher ranks of the Army say about our nation?
Tammy Smith was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General in the U.S. Army last week and received her stars from her “wife,” Tracey Hepner, in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. She is the highest-ranking open homosexual in the Army.
Tracey and Tammy look like sisters, or perhaps brothers. They are not sisters or brothers, but two unrelated women who admit to all the world that they engage in perverted acts in private and that they reject men as suitable mates. And they are applauded as mavericks for these personal failings. Unsurprisingly, Hepner is heavily involved in homosexual activism. Read More »
August 12, 2012
THE OLYMPIC GAMES are not, as Pope Benedict XVI recently said, “the greatest sporting event in the world.” They are an irredeemably vulgar and totalitarian spectacle. I have no intention of watching the closing ceremonies when they are broadcast here tonight. They couldn’t have come too soon. Judging from the photos, they were every bit as chilling as the opening ceremonies, with their bedazzling, techno-babble chaos, their pantomimes of patriotism, their flashes of demonic imagery, all under the Royal Family’s adoring gaze. It was about as enjoyable as being stunned with a Taser. Whatever residue of warm feeling I had toward the Olympics has been extinguished.
August 12, 2012
AT VFR, Philip M. writes:
Britain as I knew it has gone, all anyone can reasonably hope now is that this turns out to be an act of creative destruction from which smashed fragments may be reformed into something new.
August 10, 2012
KATHLENE M. writes:
Today’s news that the Department of Homeland Security is accused of mistreating male employees seems to follow our discussion yesterday about misanthropic feminists. According to the New York Daily News:
A blistering federal discrimination suit accuses agency honcho Janet Napolitano of turning the department into a female-run “frat house” where male staffers were banished to the bathrooms and routinely humiliated.
James Hayes Jr., who now is New York’s top Homeland Security cop, claims Napolitano filled top spots in Washington, D.C., with two of her gal pals who were bent on tormenting male employees. Read More »
August 10, 2012
AT Public Discourse, Robert Oscar Lopez, an assistant professor of English at California State University, writes movingly of his childhood in “Growing Up with Two Moms: The Untold Children’s View.” Lopez’s mother became a lesbian and he spent much of his childhood with her and her female partner. It is not entirely true that he lived with “two moms” as he spent a significant portion of his time during the week with only his mother but these two women were the parental figures in his life and his weekends were with them. Read More »
August 9, 2012
VINCENT C. writes:
After reading this piece at CNS News, I was reminded of what Konrad Adenauer, the former prime minister of (West) Germany, and a deeply religious Catholic, once said:
How improvident of the Almighty to limit man’s intelligence without limiting his stupidity.
I am scheduled to attend a Romney bus stop visit in Virginia on Saturday, and I shall inquire if it is indeed true that Romney believes the Boy Scouts should admit homosexuals as Scout leaders. If it is, the presumptive heir to the GOP presidential nomination has lost vital support from those whom Speaker Boehner is known to refer to as “knuckledraggers.”
I am ineluctably drawn to the conclusion that to believe that Romney is a “conservative” other than a fiscal one is also to believe in the tooth fairy. All “conservatives of faith” know that Romney is a cipher on social issues, but this support of homosexual leaders in the Boy Scouts is, to cite the military reference, “one bridge too far.”
August 9, 2012
BUCK writes:
This story is a hoot! It’s not from The Onion, and I don’t think that it’s supposed to be funny (maybe it’s me). But the dry way that the two report it, intentional or not, made me laugh. The two female officers “happen to be” homosexuals. What a coincidence!
DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – The controversy over Chick-Fil-A may now have impacted the Dallas Police Department.
CBS 11 has learned a Dallas Police Sergeant brought a sandwich from the embattled restaurant chain to work with him last Wednesday, August 1, a day known around the country as Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day.
When the Sergeant arrived at his post at the Southeast patrol, words were exchanged between himself and two female officers. Read More »
August 9, 2012
DANIEL O. writes:
I do not know whether you have seen the film Idiocracy, and I do not know whether you will appreciate the film. Yet, the term ”idiocracy” accurately covers the situation in which an upcoming British queen consort is cheering for a muscular black woman to beat up a Chinese woman in the boxing ring, as reported by The Daily Mail. At any rate, at least the Duchess of Cambridge was watching the beating up ”stylish” — a word expressly used by The Daily Mail.
The term “‘ochlocracy″ also comes to mind. Increasingly, I am wondering whether the modernist ”nobility” should still be addressed with their official titles by traditionalist men and women. If the nobility is as vulgar as an ochlocratic mob, then it is an ochlocracy, and should be addressed as such. However, this would mean that traditionalist men and women lose this part of their decorum, since the use of titles to address someone is a good custom. What is your take on this? What is their due?
August 9, 2012
KATHLENE M. writes:
The criticism of the masculinized Olympic women reminds me of a recent personal incident: My 90-year-old mother-in-law, who is one of the original diehard feminists, asked me if I was watching the Olympics, especially the women’s sports.
I replied, “No, not much.”
“Why not?!” she demanded to know, waiting for an opportunity to pounce as usual.
“The women look like men!” I answered. Read More »
August 9, 2012
BUCK writes:
In a matter of a few minutes yesterday, I came across three stories about the 2012 Summer Sex Olympics. How does the joke go? “Which one doesn’t belong and why?” One is about a female who flaunts her mightily maintained virginity like that is itself an Olympic event and competition. All the while she also flaunts her sexuality and body. Another story is about the Olympics as the new traveling freak show; guess which sex. The third is about the real competition; who can burn through more of the 150,000 “official” condoms before time runs out. Read More »
August 9, 2012
A TURKISH newspaper columnist has strongly criticized the defeminization of women at the Olympic Games. “Womanhood is dying at the Olympics,” Yuksel Aytug wrote in his column in the newspaper Sabah, according to The Daily Mail. Aytug said the appearance of women athletes at the games is “pathetic.”
Broad-shouldered, flat-chested women with small hips; [they are] totally indistinguishable from men.
Their breasts – the symbol of womanhood, motherhood – flattened into stubs as they were seen as mere hindrances to speed.
A man who dares to say what every normal person has been thinking when confronted with the muscle-bound female gladiators at the games and what soft, effeminate Western men would not dare articulate, Aytug has been attacked for his remarks throughout the Western world. He is tiresomely accused of misogyny. In fact, judging from these words, he is an admirer of women, a courageous defender of them. The Olympic Games are anti-woman. They require female athletes to ape men in grotesque ways. They compromise female fertility and modesty. They promote the idea that aggression and competitiveness in women are normal and healthy. They debase not just women athletes but womanhood throughout the world.
August 8, 2012
MANY PARENTS today are shockingly ignorant when it comes to the mental world of children. This ignorance is the inevitable result of the prolonged infertility that came with the sexual revolution. During their twenties and early thirties, many adults hardly interact with anyone under the age of ten. A society that produces few children grows progressively more stupid and lacking in common sense. Individuals arrive at the threshold of parenthood unprepared for the fantasy world of children and their radical phases. It’s as if a Martian had landed in their midst.
Combine this ignorance with the left’s war against traditional sex roles and you get parents who, acting upon the advice of psychologists who have a vested interest in pathologizing every quirk of childhood, allow their young son to wear a dress to school. I haven’t read more than the first page of this New York Times article by Columbia Journalism School instructor Ruth Padawer and I don’t recommend you do more than that either. I offer it only to remind you yet again of how far, far, far we have fallen in this rabbit hole and of how you should do everything you possibly can to shield your own children and grandchildren from this sick culture.
August 8, 2012
DIANA writes:
I decided to watch the news this morning and got what I deserved. On NBC, during the interminable Olympics coverage, there was a piece about “gender-neutral” bagpiping.
Turning in disgust away from this to another channel, I saw a commercial whose premise wasn’t immediately clear to me. The scene was a group of parents of young kids in a playground.
Most of the parents were white, they were well into their 30s, one was a white father with a baby strapped to his chest in one of those padded cloth contraptions. The parents were playing “middle-class one-upmanship.” (Should that be changed to one-up-personship?) Each parent challenged another parent with a question. The questions came in very rapid fire fashion with that supposedly humorous undertone latterly known as “snarky.” Read More »
August 8, 2012
DIANA writes:
Back in the 1970s, when Ms. Magazine was the new thing and all the rage, I read it. Billie Jean King was once on the cover. The interview took place before Maria Sharapova was conceived. Perhaps before her mother was conceived. BJK was ranting about how irrelevant a woman athlete’s looks should be to her public acceptability. “Does anyone judge a linebacker by his looks? Does it matter if he’s ugly, as long as he can tackle?”
I was reading the magazine in the lunchroom. A black female colleague looked at her picture on the cover and said, “Who is that?” I replied, “Billie Jean King.” Lillian said, “She is a moose.”
These arguments about beauty are endless and circular. In fact maybe they are not even arguments. It’s just one side ranting, the other side saying, “Yes dear….yes dear…..”