JAMES P. writes: The Daily Mail reports that the Army has developed a new type of body armor for women. I am reminded of the old Secret deodorant ad -- "strong enough for a man, made for a woman." Of course, that armor won't help them when their Afghan "colleagues" shoot them after they remove their body armor...
A FEMALE Air Force sergeant and the mother of two children allegedly had her husband shoot her twice in the legs last week to avoid a military deployment to Asia. According to the Associated Press:
Police say 25-year-old Judy Groomes was treated for wounds on both of her legs from one round from a handgun fired by her husband, 26-year-old Christopher Tyquan Groomes. Both are active military based at nearby Barksdale Air Force Base.
Groomes allegedly claimed an intruder shot her early Friday while her husband and two children slept. But police say she convinced her husband to shoot her to avoid military service.
Groomes, below, is white and her husband is black. Here is a slightly longer version of the story at The Daily Mail. None of the newspaper accounts of this highly implausible story say how the police know that Judy Groomes induced her husband to shoot her.
CARDINAL TIMOTHY DOLAN’s appearance Friday at Fordham University with the comedian Stephen Colbert was one more public humiliation of the Church by the grovelingly buffoonish Archbishop of New York. You know it was bad when the New York Times describes the event as “the most successful Roman Catholic youth evangelization event since Pope John Paul II last appeared at World Youth Day.”
Colbert, who calls himself Catholic, said to the Cardinal at one point: “So many Christian leaders spread hatred, especially of homosexuals. How can you maintain your joy?”
According to the Times,“Cardinal Dolan responded with two meandering anecdotes — one about having met this week with Muslim leaders, and another about encountering demonstrators outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral.”
Laurie Goldstein reports, “Mr. Colbert’s response was quick and unequivocal. ‘If someone spreads hate,’ he said, ‘then they’re not your religious leader.'”
At the Remnant, Christopher A Ferrara has a blistering appraisal of the Cardinal’s invitation to Barack Obama to the Al Smith Dinner on Oct. 18. The invitation, he writes, “demonstrates the total surrender of the Catholic Church to the Zeitgeist and the powers that be in America.”
—— Comments ——
Brad C. writes:
No reference to Cardinal Dolan is complete without an accompanying photo of the “Cheesehead” vestments.
DANIEL S. writes:
Ufology has long been a favorite topic of mine. In my teenager years I had a near obsession with the subject, devouring every book and TV documentary I could find on UFOs, abductions, and conspiracy theories. I read everything from Whitley Strieber’s famous book Communion to William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse (in which he offers the theory of an alien takeover of Earth in league with the Illuminati, which he later rejected declaring the notion of an alien takeover a false flag for the New World Order). In my own time I have witnessed UFOs, though I always shied away from specifically defining what I had seen, not knowing whether I had seen something natural or supernatural in the night sky.
In recent years I had left the topic on the back burner of my spiritual and intellectual pursuits, but a year or so back had my interest renewed after reading Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future by Father Seraphim Rose and The System of the Antichrist by Charles Upton, a disciple of the Swiss metaphysician Frithjof Schuon. (more…)
ROBERT FROST’S 1916 poem “Out, Out” is the sad and moving story of the death of a farm boy. It was based on a real life occurrence. According to Jay Parini’s biography, Robert Frost, A Life, the following obituary appeared in the Littleton Courier on March 31, 1910. The boy was a neighbor of Frost’s in New Hampshire:
Raymond Tracy Fitzgerald, one of the twin sons of Michael G. and Margaret Fitzgerald of Bethlehem, died at his home Thursday afternoon, March 24, as a result of an accident by which one of his hands was badly hurt in a sawing machine. The young man was assisting in sawing up some wood in his own dooryard with a sawing machine and accidentally hit the loose pulley, causing the saw to descend upon his hand, cutting and lacerating it badly. Raymond was taken into the house and a physician was immediately summoned, but he died very suddenly from the effects of shock, which produced heart failure.
ALEXANDRA writes:
After enjoying your blog for some time and learning a great deal from you and your readers and commenters, I am pleased to have relevant experience to share with regard to the recent entry on divorced spouses in the obituaries. I worked at a daily newspaper in a medium-sized city (population 175,000) for five years. During most of that time, I worked the obituary desk.
About a quarter of the time, a family member would prepare something. (more…)
IN THIS interesting entry about interracial marriage and the movie Mississippi Masala, the reader Jane. S. described the racial dynamics in the film. She used the phrase, “race trumps everything” to explain the end result of the interactions between the movie’s African blacks and Indians. A reader was very upset by this particular comment. She interpreted it in a literal way to mean that there are no human loyalties or obligations that transcend race.
Jane, who was once married to a man from a different race, now explains her meaning, which was that race often trumps the very best intentions in marriage. She writes:
Mrs. Campbell seems quite upset about the phrase “race trumps everything” and wants to know what I mean by that. To be honest, I don’t know precisely, so I’ll go back to the place where I first used it.
The Indian attorney in Mississippi Masala is born and raised in Uganda, and considers it his beloved homeland; he spends his entire life in good relations with blacks, he has a black friend he loves like a brother. All that goes out the window in a heartbeat, and he and his family are deported, just because of their race. He is afraid that his daughter may find herself in a similar circumstance, if she marries a guy from another race. There is no point in saying things like that don’t happen; they already have. (more…)
MORE COMMENTS have been added to this entry about the efforts of a young black man to find a wife. Also, in that thread, I emphatically reject a statement made by a commenter yesterday that black women are “sexually unappealing to men of all races.” I unfortunately scanned over that comment when it was first posted yesterday. It is an incomprehensible and clearly false statement given the procreative record of black women, not to mention their objective physical qualities. It is also mean-spirited.
ALAN writes:
The Thinking Housewife is being taken for a ride by flying saucer advocates and UFO believers. I do not “imply” that flying saucers do not exist. I assert flatly that they do exist. They are as real as rainbows and just as insubstantial.
Decades ago, when I was an amateur astronomer, I studied the Saucer Myth at great length. I read all the books and stood with people on hilltops as they pointed at stars, planets, and aircraft lights and called them “UFOs.” I attended dozens of lectures and spoke with UFO “experts” like Dr. J. Allen Hynek. For a while, I gave them the benefit of the doubt on the chance that a substantive mystery might exist.
However, years passed and no one produced a shred of evidence to support that idea. I became a UFO skeptic because I discovered there is nothing there but storytelling, anecdotes, mis-identification of ordinary objects, hoaxes, tall tales, and sensational journalism. The UFO Myth is worth studying for those reasons, but not because Aliens are flying around in super-advanced Spaceships. (And UFO advocates would have us believe that those Aliens who build and fly sleek spaceships across interstellar space were so inept as to permit one of their Saucers to conk out and crash in the New Mexico desert in 1947. That is hilarious. But it is the kind of colorful story that sells books and generates tourism dollars.) (more…)
SUSAN writes:
I just came across the short book — pamphlet really — entitled Widow With a Husband: An Alzheimer’s Experience (2008) by Kathleen Ryan. The author was married to George Blaufuss, Jr. for nineteen years, from 1988 until his death at age ninety-two in 2007. He was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1999.
The obituary for Mr. Blaufuss in the Napa Register mentions that he was predeceased by a daughter, Gail, and survived by a son, George Blaufuss III, along with two step-sons, three step-daughters, and their various descendants. (more…)
A YOUNG MAN from Massachusetts writes:
I decided to write in response to the race and marriage conversation that has been taking place on your site in the past week. I am a black young man in my early twenties who has been wrestling with the idea of interracial marriage for quite some time. I get along extremely well with conservative whites and am an active member of my local Roman Catholic parish, which is quite traditional. (more…)
IN RESPONSE to the post about the proposal in India to require husbands to pay their wives salaries, a proposal that is seriously being considered for a nation of over a billion people, thus proving that there are few unworkable fantasies beyond the imagination of modern, collectivist bureaucrats, the reader Forta Leza writes:
Here’s a thought experiment: What if a law were passed mandating that wives must cook at least five fresh dinners per week and do at least two loads of laundry per week? Or what if the law required that wives offer their husbands sexual relations at least once a week? Surely feminists would be outraged. And they would correctly note that under normal circumstances, the state should not get involved in peoples’ marriages. Which is exactly what is wrong with the wife salary proposal. (more…)
JEANETTE V. writes:
The man and woman in the back seat of a car is an ad for Jaguar. You can see more here.
The next one is an ad I received in my e-mail hawking Photoshop actions used to enhance photos. I will not be purchasing any of that business’s products.
Adriana writes:
The white woman and black man in the Jaguar ad are the two of the stars of the TV show “30 Rock.” 30 Rock features an ensemble cast, so one might try to argue that the advertisers specifically picked out a white woman and a black man from that cast, except anyone who watches the show will know that Jane Krakowski and Tracy Morgan play the two “always-at-odds” stars of the in-show television show (it’s a show about a TV show).
Laura writes:
Adriana’s point places the Jaguar ad in a different context.
I HAVE quite a few comments from readers on recent threads. Unfortunately, I have not been able to get to them yet. I hope to post them by this afternoon.
JANE S. writes:
Mississippi Masala (1992) is a movie that explores the issue of biracial marriage rather well (Spoiler alert). It’s about a man who is a third-generation Indian immigrant in Uganda. He spends his entire life in close relationships with blacks. As an attorney, he valiantly defends the rights of blacks. Then Idi Amin comes into power and expels the Indians. The man learns that his dearest childhood friend supports Amin’s decision to deport Indians, including him. He realizes that, at the end of the day, race trumps everything.
He and his family wind up in Mississippi running a motel. Their grown daughter falls in love with a young black man in the community. Her father objects to this strongly. (more…)
AUGUSTIAN PAULDURAI writes:
The Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry of India is planning to introduce a policy that would require husbands to pay a monthly salary to their homemaker wives!
The cabinet ministers have recently approved a marriage law amendment bill that will empower women to initiate no-fault divorce and get a share in the property (an incentive) acquired during the marriage. The holy Bible says [love of] money is the root of all evil. The feminist-controlled Indian government is trying to divide and destroy families by bringing money into family relationships. (more…)
DANIEL S. writes:
I had time to watch the video “trailer” of Innocence of Muslims (I am not sure if there is an actual full length version), and found it stupid, juvenile, and poorly produced. Supposedly $5 million was spent on it, though it doesn’t show. The content is deliberately inflammatory toward Muslims, depicting Muhammad as a homosexual, a violent buffoon, and womanizer. The alleged producer is an Egyptian Copt with a dubious background, supposedly he was convicted at some point of bank fraud. The actors in the movie were allegedly misled, being told that the movie was to be about a man in Egypt 2,000 years ago named “Master George,” with the actors’ dialogue later being dubbed over to make the film about Muhammad. One can make what they will of that information in judging the intention of those behind the film. (Another important question to ask is when does proper criticism and warning of the danger of Islam become overshadowed by ‘ressentiment’?)
Of course, the trailer would have never seen the light of day in the West, it would have been lost among the flood of other silly and banal videos that populate sites like Youtube. (more…)
PAUL writes about the recent discussions here on interracial marriage and relationships:
This is an extremely important topic for me and the West. I recall many years ago attending yet another wasteful business conference. I am white, and I date white women only. I met a very dark but wholly European-featured Hispanic young lady (whose elegance and heritage proved to me she was brought up in a middle-class or wealthy family and attended American Catholic schools, although she never said it, and I don’t pry). (more…)