MARY K. writes:

The Obama campaign came to my neighborhood on Saturday. I spent the morning working in my front garden, so I observed about a dozen canvassers making their rounds two by two. Every single one of them was a white female baby boomer! Most were also overweight and very poorly dressed: shorts and ratty t-shirts or tanks with bra straps hanging out, tube socks, even a few visors and fanny packs. Certainly an appropriate representation for the most proletarianizing (if that’s a word) president in history, but I doubt they could appreciate that. Read More »

DIANA M. writes:

I know I recently wrote that I was boycotting the Olympics, but I weakened and watched the women’s gymnastics night before last. I gave in to temptation. They were covering the preliminary round for the all-around competition.

I confess, and I’m sorry, because (a) I was a hypocrite and (b) what I saw affords additional reasons to boycott the Olympics.

They’ve tarted up the American female gymnasts, who are all adolescents on the verge of womanhood. Wearing heavy cosmetics has been going on for a while and is most pronounced among the Russians. However – the television producers bumped it up more than a notch with sexy “glam” shots of the U.S. girls, singly and in a group, vamping it up for the camera. Read More »

MEGAN B. sends this e-mail:

I read your blog quite often and really appreciate all that I have learned from your words. From reading posts from your readers, however, I get a deep sense of ‘doom and gloom.’

Maybe this is the bright-eyed nineteen-year-old college student in me talking, but I don’t think it’s time to ‘throw in the towel’ or to sink our heads in mourning for our country. Sure, televisions are full of sex and profanity, the Constitution is becoming nothing more than an annoying piece of paper to many lawmakers, and the notion of a nuclear family is in shambles. The list goes on and on (unfortunately). At the same time, more Americans are pro-life than ever in recent history, abortion/illegitimate pregnancies are down, and teen abstinence rates are up. People like Taylor Swift (a Christian) are selling out stadiums full of impressionable, young girls. And, there are a whole lot of people really concerned about the absurd growth of government and questioning its usefulness in the recent decades. As I understand it, that wasn’t much of an issue with the majority of people fifteen years ago. Read More »

TOM B. writes:

We have four children, whom we homeschool. My boys are at the comic book age, so I thought I’d see what comics were like, thirty-something years later. ( I was a big X-Men fan in the 70’s.)

Words fail me.

I came across a series of comics called Crossed. This is a truly demonic work, and not alone, either. Naturally, it’s quite popular; so much so, a movie is in the works. (I consider myself a gentleman, so I won’t go into detail. Google will, if you wish to have your day ruined.) Read More »

Paula Radcliffe announced this week that she will not run in the Olympic marathon because of poor health

MR. TALL writes:

I’ve been watching some of the Olympics this week, and have been struck yet again by the effects of certain sports on girls’ and women’s bodies.

The very first event shown on local TV here in Hong Kong was one of the lower weight classes in the women’s weightlifting competition. A young Chinese woman was the favorite in the event. She weighed just under 48 kg, i.e. about 106 pounds. But she was virtually unrecognizable as a woman of that weight. She was very short in stature, and had abnormally short, thick limbs, and a blunt, stocky torso; her body looked distorted and deformed. Should women be competing in weightlifting? That seems to me a pretty easy ‘no’.

But then what about sports such as swimming? Putting aside suspicions that some of the competitors are doping (see the case of another Chinese girl, i.e. Ye Shiwen, the 15-year-old who won the 400m Individual Medley), just look at the competitors as they line up for the swimming races. All of them have remarkably wide shoulders, with the huge latissimus dorsi characteristic of hard-core swimmers. They look closer to normal than the weightlifters, but are those manly shoulders permanent? I’m not sure. Read More »

[NOTE: Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day is tomorrow, Wednesday, August 1, not today, as stated in the previous entry.]

BUCK writes:

I just happened to hear a few minutes of radio talk show today. They were discussing Chick-Fil-A. I’m going to find the closest one and patronize it. I’ve never been in one.

A guy from Virginia said that he saw a Chick-Fil-A that was so crowded that employees were directing traffic and had to set up orange safety cones to manage the line of cars that were backed up on the street. Perhaps Dan Cathy is a marketing genius. Perhaps there are a lot of hungry, unsatisfied Americans who have been waiting to Fil -up on something wholesome. Read More »

I HAVE been away from the computer for most of the day. I hope to get to comments soon.

THOUGH this is the first year in Olympic history that all of the participating teams, even Saudi Arabia, include female athletes, there are still significant hurdles to equality, writes Jere Longman of The New York Times. For instance, the Japanese women’s soccer team flew coach to London while the men’s team flew business class.

On the other hand, among the female participants is a Malaysian woman who was eight months pregnant when she competed Friday in an air rifle event. That’s a sign of progress, Longman writes, as is the lesbian who came out in public.

Read More »

KATHLENE M. writes:

No doubt many of your readers have sent a link to the Target ad that shows two men who are apparently about to be “married” (or who are celebrating their “marriage”). Target claims it plans to stay neutral in the same-sex “marriage” debate, despite running this ad. So now we can add Target to the ever-growing list of companies that seek to undermine traditional marriage and traditional American values. That list includes Amazon, Macy’s, J.C. Penney, Starbucks, and General Mills. It’s increasingly apparent that our elite want to force same-sex “marriage” on the entire nation, “whether we like it or not” (to quote Gavin Newsom who forced same-sex marriage on Californians a few years ago). Read More »

BEN J. writes:

I live in Colorado, in the Denver metro area, so obviously the rampage in Aurora has been front and center in the news for a while now.

Regarding the discussion about the absence of any men in the theater who were armed, I grew up in Colorado, but sojourning in high crime areas of Houston and Dallas changed the way I viewed personal protection. I have carried a firearm (concealed) for years now. Read More »

The torch lighting, London, 1948

THE LONDON Olympics of 1948 cost £600,000, the equivalent of $30 million today, and the event turned a small profit. There were no corporate sponsors and the entire bill was paid by amateur athletic associations and ticket sales, in contrast to the debt-ridden 2012 Olympics, which will cost a total of $14.5 billion. Nor was there anything in 1948 like the frenzied, extravagant, disjointed spectacle that was last night’s opening ceremonies, a celebration of Britain’s emergence from the Industrial Revolution into the age of socialist medicine, multiculturalism, and bad music. I cannot imagine what the average Briton who knows his nation is foundering in debt and subsumed by mass immigration thought in his heart of hearts of this show, with its alternately sentimental and sinister imagery, but here is a comment from a reader of The Telegraph:

The world is not in need of knowing how ‘good’ we are at putting on a show, that is obvious. What the world needed to sense was our moral purpose and commitment, this was sadly intensely lacking. Oh yes, this was the UK as perceived by certain media and political elites, all of whom should be shocked now at their lack of political maturity. The Queen symbolically parachuting into the arena a composition of PR folly and stupidity. Read More »

I HAD a fascinating discussion yesterday with a woman who has been in the hair salon business for 40 years. This woman, whom I will call Adriana, knew nothing when we were first talking about this website.

Adriana was very excited because she had just invested in new laser technology for her salon. This technology is something of a miracle because with no apparent side effects other than reddening of the scalp, it can stimulate non-functioning hair follicles to grow hair again. She described in detail how it works and I grilled her with questions because, well, it was just interesting. My first thought was that this represents a revolution for bald men. The treatment is time-consuming and fairly expensive, but a man who is largely bald can achieve a full head of hair again. Read More »

FOUR out of five Time magazine special-issue Olympic covers feature women athletes, including hurdler Lolo Jones, above. Four out of five.  Magazines often emphasize Olympic women gymnasts and ice skaters, but here we see traditionally male domains such as soccer, which has a relatively small following on the women’s side, and javelin, which has an even smaller following. These photos offer the androgynous ideal of hyper-masculine, Spartan warriors.

Photos of male athletes don’t present the same perverse opportunities. Muscular male athletes don’t suggest femininity so they don’t assist the pervasive effort to get everyone, male and female, to undergo a psychological sex change operation.

These photos are a craven appeal not to women who will ever realistically be athletes but to normal women. Be hard-charging. Compete like a man. There is something supremely wasteful and non-commercial about feminine tenderness, which is why popular culture, soaked as it is in materialism, stands so adamantly against it.

A man becomes more masculine by engaging in intensely competitive sports at the highest level. A woman becomes less womanly, except in sports that allow an explicit expression of feminine aesthetics, such as ice skating and gymnastics. That’s a fact of life. It may very well be harmless for a minority of women to make these sacrifices, either temporarily or permanently, but the  glorification of aggression and competitiveness in women that now comes with Olympic sports extends beyond this small minority, and is not harmless.

This 1900 photo of Charlotte Cooper, the first woman champion in the Olympics, suggests that conformity to a masculine ideal is not new to women’s Olympic sports.

Read More »

THE blogger Vanishing American addresses the issues I raised in the post on women Olympic athletes. She writes:

One more thing that puzzles me about the adulation directed at the ‘Amazon athletes’: I thought that most right-wing males loathed feminism, and hated the masculinization of women, and their reputed aggressiveness and competitiveness with men. Yet they seem to prefer the well-muscled, androgynous look of some of the women athletes, a look that at one time would have been considered too unfeminine. The old standard of femininity and modesty is all but gone, while the ideal of beauty veers more toward the same muscular and lean standard which epitomizes male attractiveness. Read More »

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor argues that liberalism is a type of mental and spiritual disease. He writes:

Liberalism errs about the order of being, and so disagrees with the world. It’s poor policy to argue with the universe, no? Yet that is just what liberalism does, and not just in the economic realm. Liberalism is at war with life itself, at every level; for it carries its profound philosophical errors into concrete practice. It implements its misprisions. As I have elsewhere said, the liberal is engaged in a death struggle with his own body.

Perhaps the liberal needs something like the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous to wean himself gradually from unreality.

Read More »

THE New York Times included this photo today of 10-year-old Kameron Slade making a speech in support of same-sex marriage before the New York City Council. Kameron, who was encouraged to write the speech by his mother, is surrounded by adults (is that the right word?) almost brought to tears by his ideological precocity.

If a child says it, it must be true.

Read More »

KAREN I. writes:

The following photo of two American women Olympic soccer players is on the front page of the The Wall Street Journal today. The woman on the right is not in the newspaper photo, but she is in online versions. The two women embracing are Megan Rapinoe (top) and Alex Morgan.

Looking at this, I cannot imagine any normal little girl wanting to grow up to be an Olympic soccer player, can you?

Laura writes:

I think little girls see these images of women who are getting lots of public attention and unconsciously imitate them. By the way, there are more women than men in the Olympics this year, which is to be expected given that virtually every modern regime is pushing women to ape men and devoting unprecedented resources to women’s athletics.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates imagines an egalitarian, communistic world ruled by the select. The key to erasure of the distinctions between the sexes, he says, is to rid women of shame and induce them to practice athletics in nakedness with the men. “And the man who laughs at naked women practicing gymnastics for the sake of the best, ‘plucks from his wisdom an unripe fruit for ridicule’ and doesn’t know — as it seems — at what he laughs or what he does.” (Book V, 457; transl. Allan Bloom)

The world of the macho female athlete is the world of the super state.

Feminine modesty protects privacy and intimacy, everything that is separate from the collective hive. The strongest objection to the near-naked Amazon is not founded in prudishness, but in the desire to prevent a form of human slavery. Most people don’t get that and when you defend female modesty they get caught up in the idea that you don’t want women to have fun.

  Read More »

AS a commenter points out in the previous entry, an acquaintance of astronaut Sally Ride, writing in The Washington Post, lauds the achievements of Ride and her sister, Karen, a Presbyterian minister who goes by the name of “Bear.” The Ride sisters, he writes, have changed the world. Their parents encouraged them to “study hard, to do their best and be anything they wanted to be.” The groundbreaking Ride sisters both became lesbians. Karen Ride is “married” to another female Presbyterian minister, and Sally, as was revealed by her homosexual activist sister this week, has been in a lesbian relationship for decades.

“The Ride family is an all-American family and at the same time an extraordinary one,” writes Michael Adee. Lesbianism has gone from shameful to a badge of honor.

What went wrong in this “all-American family?” Here’s a clue. The mother Joyce was known for her “groundbreaking Sunday School lessons about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movements to the little children there.” The Ride sisters grew up imbibing the Kool-Aid and their mother filled their glasses to the top.

Read More »