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LIFESITE NEWS reports that General Mills, one of the world’s largest food companies, has come out in opposition to a Minnesota state constitutional amendment banning homosexual “marriage.” The marketer of products such as Cheerios and Pillsbury biscuits, based in Minnesota and heavily dependent on families with children, has committed what Brian Brown of the National Orgnization for Marriage calls “one of the the dumbest corporate PR stunts of all time.”

Here, according to Wikipedia, are some of the products marketed by General Mills, all of which you can easily do without: Read More »

A FEMALE READER in Canada writes:

You have a wonderful site and I am so glad that there are other women out there, like me, who oppose feminism and have had just about enough of the lies, the distortion of history, and the constant victimhood status of feminists. Read More »

ALAN writes:

My father was an ordinary, patriotic American working man. He grew up in the 1920s, was an Army Air Corps veteran of World War II, and a loyal Catholic throughout his life. He understood that certain things are sacred and never open to negotiation. He knew that “No” is one of the most important words in life. He always played by the rules. His character would never allow him to play any other way.

Self-discipline, hard work, responsibility, self-restraint, and loyalty were the essence of his character. Decency was his middle name. In all my life, I never heard him use a profane word or expression. He enjoyed life but was no cockeyed optimist. He had no illusions about the follies and foolishness of most human beings. He had no use for the speed and busyness of modern life. He looked upon rock “music” as several grades below noise. He was certainly no Modernist. He never read a word of what Richard Weaver wrote. But he shared a profound distrust of what Professor Weaver called the “hysterical optimism” so typical of Modernists, i.e., the delusion that they are going to make the world over with “new ideas” and “new solutions” because they are so much “better informed” than those who preceded them. My father knew that Modernists usually make things worse by abandoning long-established ideas and principles. Read More »

WINNIE writes:

Living in New York’s Capital Region, I’ve grown up subject to the ugliness that is the Empire State Plaza – Nelson D. Rockefeller’s brainchild, the construction of which called for razing old ethnic neighborhoods and laid waste to “residential” Albany as such. (Ann Althouse had a thread about this monstrosity from a few years back.)

Here are but a few examples of what New York’s state workers are visually and spatially bombarded by as they arrive at and leave their jobs — as if the jobs themselves were not sufficiently soul-crushing. (“Art” & architecture as oppressor: part of the plan?)

As an antidote and a call to better attention, I recommend Roger Scruton’s documentary on Youtube. Read More »

WE DISCUSSED (here and here) one of the stunning female portraits of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres  — the portrait of the Comtesse D’Haussonville. Here is another captivating face, that of Madame Frederic Reiset. The oil painting was completed in 1846. Notice its conscious resemblance to the early form of photography, the daguerreotype, which would have been capturing attention then.

The art critic Kenneth Clark wrote that Madame Reiset was a friend of the painter’s and “one can feel it.” Clark wrote in his book The Romantic Rebellion:

Madame Reiset has recorded that when he was painting it she used to hear Monsieur Ingres groaning and sobbing in the next room, so painful to him was the attempt to combine truth and style.

Ingres had a way of harmonizing the sumptuous clothing of the era with personality. The delicate lace collar here complements the melting quality of Madame Reiset’s face and turns a somewhat austere gown into a thing of great beauty. As for the dramatic ringlets, they are the perfect enclosure — like an ornate wrought iron fence around a garden — for the deep pools of Madame Reiset’s eyes.

Everything about Madame Reiset as conveyed in this portrait is a standing rebuke to modern feminism. To a feminist, her passivity, her elegance, her delicacy  — all are signs of her victimization.

Read More »

SIGRID writes:

I am a regular but silent reader. Your passing reference to the cult of ugliness struck a chord today. As it happened, I read the post just after returning from a docent-led tour at the Corcoran Gallery. The docent was an delightful older woman (probably well into her 70s) who skillfully mixed “textbook” art history with her own personal take on the pieces. Read More »

TITLE IX, the federal law which institutionalized discrimination against men in collegiate athletics, has not been a success, say sports experts interviewed by The New York Times. That’s because whites are deliberately excluding black women from scholarships and team participation. Read More »

NO ONE perceived as only good has genuine moral status as a human being. Most white Christians believe it is virtuous to deprive non-whites of moral status. In fact, it is wrong and dehumanizing to do so. At VFR, Jeff W. has an excellent statement on this issue: Read More »

SEE the descriptions by Thor Christopher at DoublethinkNot of black assaults last weekend in Chicago. Here is the real story, not the “coverupage.”

When it comes to black crime, most journalists are professional deceivers similar to the journalists in Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel The Camp of the Saints. They do not think. They throb. Steve Chapman of The Chicago Tribune throbs when asked why the newspaper routinely refuses to tell the race of flash mob attackers, whose primary aim is not to rob, which might imply something other than pure sadism, but to harm and intimidate.

The journalists in The Camp similarly do everything to avoid the facts as the terrible flotilla approaches Europe to beseige its native population. From Chapter 17:

And so, into the pressroom of the Élysée Palace, amid five hundred reporters all concerned more with rhetoric than truth, slipped the battering ram’s most recent recruit: the starving passenger of the pathetic fleet. The question was very well put. Not the principle question, to be sure. No frontal attack that might frighten off the faint of heart. But a question that checked the big issues at the door, and subtly aimed at the hidden, the most vulnerable spot: “…may I ask if the government has any plans to ease the plight of these poor, suffering souls? It’s reaching a point where we can’t sit idly by…” True, the West can’t sit idly by anymore. [Transl., Norman Shapiro]

Read More »

THE MODERN apocalypse leads with inexorable logic to pizza vending machines. Rene Lyon reports at Los Angeles Times that European pizza machines are coming to America this year. Read More »

DRINA writes:

You have clarified before that homemade pizza is a perfectly good and acceptable food. Perhaps some of your readers who aren’t ready to give up pizza would consider making their own? I challenge them to make their own pizza for a few months and then try going back to cheese-product topped cardboard if they dare.

Pizza is on our family menu at least once a month, and we usually enjoy three basic kinds: regular tomato sauce, Alfredo sauce, and pesto. Read More »

DON VINCENZO writes:

The subject of feminism within the “women religious” organizations in the Catholic Church, or, for that matter, the U.S. Forest Service, or the U.S. military, has been discussed before, but please allow  me to add several notable events that might serve as a coda to earlier commentary about its impact on the Church. Read More »

FOR 153 years, St. Joseph’s Academy in Brentwood, N.Y. was a Catholic prep school. As noted at The Remnant,  St. Joseph’s, which closed in 2009, has just reopened as a Muslim school. Its new purpose involves “inculcating the work view [sic] of Islam and its mission.” That should be a-okay for most modern Catholics. In 1999, Pope John Paul II kissed a copy of the Koran — and there was little objection. After all, a religion is a religion.

Imagine, however, the same thing reversed — an illustrious Muslim academy converted into a Catholic school. Muslims do not kiss the Bible. They do not believe all religions are basically one — and, in that, they are right.

Read More »

JEANETTE V. writes:

Interesting how this woman who induced her own abortion at 20 weeks is being portrayed as a victim. She is a victim — of feminism and the cheapening of sex and marriage and ultimately of human life.

Read More »

Mary Queen of Scots played golf on the links at St Andrews.

BEN writes:

The prevalence of debilitating sports injuries among young women in my age range (25) is alarming. I suggest an alternative sport for young women: golf. It can be played without great risk of injury. It can be played well in attire becoming to a woman (obviously I am not referring to hat bands masquerading as skirts or shorts). The movements required are graceful and dignified. Golf is very challenging, especially from a psychological perspective. Integrity is demanded, the player is also the referee. There is no physical contact or violence, as the game is peaceful and serene. Read More »

STEVE KOGAN writes:

Ronald Dworkin has had a long career in legal studies as a liberal-left philosopher of politics and law.  His bibliography is extensive, and his NYU faculty profile states that he is “probably one of two or three contemporary authors whom legal scholars will be reading 200 years from now.”  It is a fitting prophecy for this craftsman of exaggeration.

Dworkin’s recent essay “Why the Mandate is Constitutional,” is, as the expression goes, a piece of work. The reader is confronted with the following hyperbole at the opening of the piece:

The Supreme Court’s hearings in the health care case, US Department of Health and Human Services v. Florida, over a nearly unprecedented three days of oral argument in late March, generated all the attention, passion, theater, and constant media and editorial coverage of a national election or a Super Bowl.  Nothing in our history has more dramatically illustrated the unique role of courtroom drama in American government and politics as well as entertainment. Read More »

HERE’S an excellent piece by Ilana Mercer at WorldNet Daily on the utter falsity of the claim that women on average are paid less than men because of unfair bias in the workplace. Mercer makes one especially important point:

If your average Republican were capable of dispelling distaff America’s claims of disadvantage with economic logic, this is what she’d conclude:

If women with the same skills as men were getting only 78 cents for every dollar a man earns, as Pelosi lamented, men as a group would have long-since priced themselves out of the market. The fact that entrepreneurs don’t ditch men for women suggests that different abilities and experience are at work, rather than a conspiracy to suppress women.

As I said earlier this week, the pay discrimination argument entirely rests on the assumption that businesses are prone to violate their own interests flagrantly and knowingly, and to turn down profit. The animosity of employers toward more than half the population must be so deep that they would rather see good women employees go elsewhere than pay them fairly. This antipathy must be so pervasive and automatic that businesses need not even conspire together to work against women, who, again, represent more than half of the population. They just dislike them and so pay them less. And they don’t hire more women even though women are so darn cheap to employ.

That the pay inequity argument is routinely referred to by politicians as if it were sacred and indisuptable fact is an indicator of just how dormant the American mind is.