KARL D. writes:

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

The Associated Press carried a story the other day that is meant, I suppose, to be both heart-warming and reassuring. It’s about the grit of our gals, guys and in-betweens in uniform. Call me cold-hearted if you like, but I found it neither heart-warming nor reassuring. It’s the kind of story that makes me miss Lawrence Auster’s pithy commentary all the more.

The story celebrates the achievement of U.S. Army Sergeant First Class (SFC – E-7) Greg Robinson in completing the Army’s air assault school at Fort Campbell, Kentucky — home of the 101st Airborne Division.  (Despite its name, the 101st is an air assault division: most of its soldiers no longer train to make parachute jumps into battle, but are flown into action in helicopters in the manner combat-proved by the 1st Cavalry Division in Vietnam and Cambodia.) (more…)

  EVEN those who reject some of the tactics and principles of Frigide Barjot, the former comedienne who has organized the massive Manif Pour Tous rallies against homsexual marriage in France, can appreciate the courage and tenacity of this woman. In this video of her outside the National Assembly last week on the day the Assembly approved same-sex "marriage" and homosexual adoption, she walks through a crowd of hostile and angry homosexuals who push her and call her names.

THE PHILADELPHIA City Council last week approved a bill that would require the city’s health plan to pay for sex change surgery, as well as psychotherapy, hormone treatments, and laser-hair removal for those pretending to be the opposite sex. A city that can barely meet its operating expenses and that has scared legions of businesses away with its draconian taxes and crime has now turned to investing in the medical mutilation of its citizens. Perhaps there is logic in this.

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MARY THOM, former editor of Ms. Magazine and a guiding force of the American feminist movement, died on Friday. The New York Times, which never fails to inform us of the deaths of even the most marginal of feminist leaders, reports in her obituary:

Ms. Thom never married, and her friends said her true love was her motorcycle, a 1996 Honda Magna 750. On it, she zipped around town — to dinners in the West Village, feminist talks, and back home to her apartment on the Upper West Side.

On Friday, she was riding on the Saw Mill River Parkway shortly after 4 p.m. when she hit a car, throwing her onto the road, the Westchester County police said. She was pronounced dead at the scene.

Ms. Thom was 68 years old.

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  THE nineteenth century artist and writer William Morris brought immense beauty to Victorian homes. His designs continue to inspire decorators. "It helps the healthiness both of body and soul to live among beautiful things," he wrote. His wallpapers, such as this Blue Fruit Wallpaper, were in middle class Victorian homes, as well as great estates. Other examples can be found here. Morris wrote that any decoration is "futile if it does not remind you of something beyond itself, craftsmanship involving not only the mastery of technique, but the evocation of spiritual qualities of breadth, imagination, and order." Unfortunately, Morris was a socialist and thus incongruously promoted ideas that would lead to an assault of ugliness, domestic and otherwise.

BLESSED POPE JOHN PAUL II continues to inspire hideous public statuary. This 45-foot fiberglass behemoth will be officially unveiled tomorrow in the Polish city of Czestochowa. The businessman, Leszek Lyson, who funded it and erected it on private land, is said to be hoping it will qualify for the Guinness Book of Records, which shows the level of artistic ambition involved. The statue should make people stop and think, Lyson said. Yes, I suppose so. Monolithic statues of Lenin made people stop and think too. They made them stop and think of one man and his role in the New World Order.

Similar to another monstrosity, the statue of John Paul outside the Termini Station in Rome (see below), the new papal tower, with its widespread arms, is an all-embracing figure. “Come one, Come all. The Church is whatever you wish to make it,” it seems to say. Though he helped resist Communism in his homeland of Poland and is not to be equated with or placed into the same category as Lenin, the globe-trotting John Paul was a revolutionary figure who helped the Church become more International YMCA than the Eternal City of God. Revolutionary figures inspire revolutionary art.

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  IN THIS video, previously posted at Galliawatch, a French woman, demonstrating on April 17th against the legalization of homosexual "marriage," is hauled away by the police as she protests that she has done nothing wrong.

AT the Center for Political Islam, Kenneth Roberts examines the Islamic concept of honor and its probable role in the Boston Marathon bombings. Roberts writes:

Why do some American journalists have trouble discerning the motives behind the Boston bombings? The Tsarnaev brothers killed Bostonians for the honor of Islam. Westerners do not understand the Islamic concept of honor. ‘Honor’ to a Muslim is something as concrete and tangible as the Washington Monument, the Colorado River or the Rocky Mountains.

Honor as Plunder

To a Muslim, ‘honor’ is as real as money in the bank or gold coins hidden in a box in the drawer. Honor brings prestige to Islam, to Mohammed and to Allah. Because ‘honor’ is so important in Islam, the main goal of jihad is to acquire more ‘honor’ for Islam. How this acquisition is done is simple. It is done through (sic) by humiliating kafirs. For Muslims, honor is real and concrete, and not merely an abstract concept. (more…)

SEBASTIEN writes:

I was at the demonstration at the Place des Invalides in Paris on Friday the 19th of April, when a Catholic priest was arrested and kicked in the head by the police. There is a lengthy video of what transpired here.

Every night last week, there was an official demonstration from 7:30 p.m. until around 10 p.m. After 10 p.m., we are all supposed to disperse and this is what most people do. I was very happy to see our SSPX priests turn up at around 9:30 pm to be with us for the rest of the night.

Firstly, l’Abbé Beauvais stood in front of the barricades and got the crowd to repeat in song lines which he had composed a little earlier:  “A real family is a Daddy and a Mummy.” (The films I made are here.) After the singalong, the game of tag with the riot police started. As I am a timid soul, I preferred to watch from the sidelines but you can have a very good idea of what happened by watching the footage here. Starting at minute 8:52, you can see the Catholic brother trying to intervene during the arrest of a minor and they both get dragged away. As the brother gets dragged through the barricade, you can see the plain clothes police getting some violent kicks in his head. These are his injuries. (more…)

DEBBIE SCHLUSSEL reports on the immigration history of the family of the Boston bombing suspects:

The Tsarnaev family committed immigration fraud, falsely claiming persecution and requesting asylum it never should have gotten. You can blame that on the Bush Administration, which granted the Tsarnaev family both tourist visas to come here and then asylum for the entire family . . . less than a year after 9/11, when scrutiny of Muslim applicants for asylum should have been stepped up. Instead, Bush Administration pandering to Islam was stepped up. (more…)

KARL D. writes:

Have you noticed how the word “hero” has been bandied about by the media regarding almost anyone and everyone who was involved in the Boston bombing? The man who found the bomber hiding in his boat and called the police? Hero. A victim who lost both his legs who visited another victim in the same hospital to give her a gift? Hero.

What is even more surprising is the absolute venom I have encountered from people when I point out the fact that neither of these men were heroes. One was merely a good citizen doing his civic duty, and the other a victim who performed a kind act for another victim. It seems most people really do operate in a knee-jerk emotional way. The fact that the true meaning of the word “hero” has become so watered down as to render it meaningless does not seem to bother them in the least. Interestingly, out of all the people who called me a “nasty little man” for pointing this out, the majority were female.

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FEMINISM has resulted in many terrific career opportunities for women, but few fields previously closed to them due to stubborn convention are as rich with novel opportunities as prison work.

According to federal prosecutors, 13 female “corrections officers” were enjoying their careers so much that they essentially handed control of the Baltimore City Detention Center over to a gang, helping gang members sell and smuggle drugs and offering them tough love on the side, The Washington Post reported yesterday. A leader of the Black Guerilla Family fathered five children in the Baltimore jail with four of the guards since 2009. Two of the women had tattoos of the gang leader’s name, perhaps tip-offs to the authorities that something was not quite right. (more…)

  FROM Colorful Realm of Living Beings, a 30-scroll set of paintings by the eighteenth century Japanese artist, Itō Jakuchū.

AS ANTICIPATED, the National Assembly of France today passed the highly controversial “Taubira law” redefining marriage and legalizing homosexual unions. The bill was approved by a comfortable margin in the Socialist-majority Assembly, 331-225. The Associated Press reports:

Legions of officers with water cannons braced outside the National Assembly for possible violence on an issue that galvanized the country’s faltering right.

According to the AP, protests that draw hundreds of thousands constitute the “faltering right.” Don’t be fooled by attempts to present this issue as closed. It is not over in France. The protesters have vowed to continue and are likely to be motivated by this action by the National Assembly, which has disregarded their insistence that homosexual “marriage” and adoption are harmful to children and will devastate French culture. A national demonstration is scheduled for May 26 and, in the meantime, ongoing smaller demonstrations are expected.

The protesters have discovered their principles and the words to express them in a way that those opposed to homosexual marriage in other countries have not. They will not surrender and this action by the National Assembly bodes a great deal of strife and division ahead. The sign carried by protesters last week above (and posted at Galliawatch) reads:

“A civilization rests on what is demanded of men, not on what is given to them.”

The French, in the end, may awaken in more profound ways to the threats to their civilization posed by what Philippe Bénéton calls “equality by default,” the radical equality that banishes meaningful distinctions.

Default man is liberated from every norm and every model; he no longer forms part of an order that transcends him. He enjoys a sovereign independence. He is a stranger in the universe. [Equality by Default; 2004, p. 21]

Large numbers of the French people have turned against this state of radical liberation. In the end, however, it is not a question of numbers, of how many people on either side of the issue there are. It is a question of right and wrong, and even if only a handful of protesters hit the streets in Paris, there would still be only one right answer to this question.

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THE Daily Mail has good coverage of the Bostom bombing suspects, including this article about Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s American wife, Katherine Russell, whose friends say she had a less than idyllic marriage. There is no mention that Russell’s friends or family did anything to try and prevent her marriage.

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JONAS HASSEN KHEMIRI, a celebrated novelist and playwright in Sweden, has written a denunciation of white Swedish society, translated here for The New York Times, in response to reports of racial profiling by police. The piece is called “Sweden’s Closet Racists,” and could have been written by any nonwhite American college student gamely fulfilling an essay assignment to describe his history of brutal subjugation.

Khemiri speaks on behalf of “[w]e Swedes who do not fit the outdated blond, blue-eyed stereotype of what a true Swede should look like.” The offspring of an Arab/Swedish marriage, he says dark-skinned immigrants are subjected to “low-intensity oppression.” What is this oppression? We find a list of familiar trivial complaints. Though it appears Khemiri has been lavished with attention by Swedish society for his writings, he has in fact been repeatedly disrespected. He has suffered the inconvenience of being scrutinized by police and security guards and the unpleasant experiences of being chased by skinheads. No mention that this extra scrutiny is related to the crime rate of Sweden’s nonwhites. No mention of the whites who have been chased, mugged and raped.

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ALAN writes:

In your post on the “Religion of Peace,” you quoted a newspaper statement that Americans are “searching for answers.” That struck me as hilarious and true. I immediately recalled a remark Ayn Rand made in a speech in 1960:

The truth about the intellectual state of the modern world … which distinguishes it from other periods of cultural crises, is the fact that what people are seeking is not the answers to problems, but the reassurance that no answers are possible.

— Philosophy: Who Needs It; Ayn Rand (1982), p. 71

Modernists are searching not for answers but for new and improved excuses and evasions, because there is nothing Modernists hate more than responsibility and accountability. The first responsibility of any grown-up is to see that X is so, i.e., that there are certain realities that cannot be evaded, papered over, or defined out of existence. But this is precisely what modern Americans – “Liberals” and “Conservatives” alike – assiduously refuse to see. To borrow a phrase from English professor Eric Larsen, modern Americans are “a nation gone blind.” They are morally obtuse.

Evil exists. Some people are evil. Not all people want the same things. Conflict exists and is inevitable between and among all people. Ordinary men and women have understood these things for centuries. Modern Americans do not want to understand them because they stand at odds with utopian fantasies like diversity, multiculturalism, tolerance, and open borders.  (more…)