EMILY HALL writes:

Your blog, in general, has inspired me to invest in my home the way I used to invest in my resume and to document my efforts.

Thank you.

Read More »

HANNON writes:

Charlize Theron in "Young Adult"

  DIANA writes:

The movie “Young Adult” is the story of Mavis Gary, a young woman from a small town in Minnesota who on the surface seems to have it all. She’s beautiful, lives in a luxury high rise in the big city (Minneapolis), has a cool job ghost-writing young adult “you go girl” novels for a best-selling franchise, and has her pick of men.

The irony of the title “Young Adult” is that this purveyor of fantasies for young adults is a fraud. She’s a big child, a bundle of needs with no responsibilities. Her apartment is a mess, she’s beautiful but is always slovenly except when she’s cleaning up for a date or to manipulate people, she secretly despises her job, and her only emotional bond is with her toy dog, a Pomeranian. She drinks heavily and pigs out on junk food when things don’t go her way. Read More »

AT VFR, Mark Jaws writes:

Since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 somewhere between 30,000 to 40,000 whites have been murdered by blacks. On average blacks murder about 750 whites per year, while the annual “white” on black murder rate (no doubt many Hispanics are included among the “white” perpetrators) is about 250. According to the Tuskegee Institute, between 1880 and 1950 white mobs lynched 3,300 blacks. Thus in a period of 45 years approximately ten times as many whites have been murdered by blacks than all the blacks lynched in America during the allegedly murderous reign of Jim Crow. Facts — indisputable, and so sadly, unmentionable.

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Mariss Jansons conducting the Vienna Philharmonic

THE VIENNA PHILHARMONIC’S New Year’s Day concert scored record television ratings this week. As I wrote here, the Austrian orchestra has resisted the multicultural and feminist changes embraced by most of the Western music world. Read More »

HERE is another example of Pennsylvania German fraktur, in this case a house blessing, or haussegen. It is written on behalf of the head of the household. The translated inscription [it appears to be a rough translation] reads: Read More »

BRENDA writes:

Your grandfather’s letter was truly beautiful. For some reason it makes me think of a scene in National Treasure, where Abigail Chase is talking to Ben Gates about the language of the Declaration of Independence. She says to him, “People don’t talk that way anymore.” Ben replies, “No, but they think that way.”  Read More »

KAREN I. writes:

Below is an excerpt from an article in Redbook magazine in which a working mother admits that she left her 18-month-old child in the care of someone whose last name she didn’t know so she could get to work when her nanny called in sick! Read More »

DIANA writes:

May I suggest your readers take some time to read about the Student Non-Discrimination Act. Under the benign language of “non-discrimination,” the federal government will be able to force schools to accept the behavior of flamboyant, gender-nonconforming kids as normal. Read More »

ROGER G. writes:

Donald Trump said on the Sean Hannity Show yesterday that the once mighty Kodak has gone bankrupt because they didn’t get the U.S. government to protect them from Fuji. Trump argued that Fuji destroyed Kodak by selling below manufacturing costs.

Kristor, please address this. Read More »

JEREMY writes:

You may have seen the news about Penn State’s post-scandal memos. Frankly, it’s everything I expected — but why was reading it so sickening to me? Read More »

MSN reports five reasons to buy a small house, including reasons discussed in previous posts on the subject here, such as the benefit of not hoarding large quantities of unused possessions. The report does not mention another important psychological benefit. Dwellers of small homes know each other. They are more likely, in my unprofessional opinion, to learn to manage the petty slights and annoyances that are part of communal living.

Small houses create interior castles. The bloating of the American house at a time when family size has declined is a cause and result of spiritual shrinkage.

WHY did Michele Bachmann do so poorly among women voters? According to polls in December, she had less than 8 percent of the female vote in Iowa.

The answer to this question perhaps can be found by looking at Sarah Palin’s popularity. Though Palin withdrew, it’s safe to assume she would have done much better among women voters. Read More »

THIS SATURDAY is the 61st anniversary of the death of my maternal grandfather, whom I obviously never met. Reading through family papers this week, I came across once again this eloquent letter he wrote to his mother from the front lines in France during World War I. And, I thought I might share it with readers.

My grandfather was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He volunteered for the British Expeditionary Force in early 1917, before America entered World War I. He became one of several hundred physicians loaned to the British Army for the duration of the war. He had the rank of lieutenant and spent two years tending to the wounded on the front lines.  After the war was over, he married, fathered seven children and ran a busy medical practice. Exposure to mustard gas during the war caused his health eventually to fail. He became seriously ill in his late fifties and died at the age of 62.

His mother, who had eight children, was widowed in her forties. My grandfather’s sisters worked as secretaries and teachers to put him through medical school at Georgetown University before the war. Here is his letter home on May 11, 1918 on the occasion of Mother’s Day.

Dearest Mother,

I happened to see in the Paris paper that Sunday, the 12th is Mother’s Day and that we might celebrate by writing to our Mothers, such letters to receive special consideration in the mails. So these are my thoughts to you Mother mine.

Read More »

HERE is another handmade Pennsylvania German birth certificate in the fraktur style. It records the birth of Elias Nicholas in 1823 and was created by a young woman named Elizabeth Borneman Dieterly. The inscription records the names of the infant’s parents and godparents, the date and location of his birth, and a few other important details. It also includes this message:

Scarcely born into the world, it is only a short measured pace from the first step to the cool grave in the earth. O with every moment! Our strength diminishes, and with every year we grow more ripe for the bier. Read More »

ART from Texas writes:

My parents are not very conservative and my mother is somewhat liberal though she is a churchgoer now. Nevertheless, they homeschooled me and as a result I was not subjected to the indoctrination of the school system. I was exposed to both Asimov and C.S. Lewis. I read God in the Dock when I was a small boy. In general society, I was exposed to viewpoints outside the liberal vein. All this was a benefit to my education. This is part of the reason why feminists want to keep parents away from children.

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JEANETTE V. writes:

This is a fine example of just how degraded we have become as a culture. A television commercial portrays a man dressed as a woman in a woman’s restroom. He is applying make-up in a mirror next to a woman. They compete for a feminine look until finally the woman pulls out a tampon and the cross-dressing man walks away in a huff.

The idiocy of the resulting scandal is even worse. The mentally confused and disturbed are decrying the ad not because of its disgusting portrayal of a cross-dressing man but because it is “transphobic.” The media is reporting this as if it is “news.”  Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

The Economist recently featured a special report titled “Women and Work.” (November 26, 2011) What struck me the most about all of the articles in the report was their anti-human utopianism. The central theme was that we are moving towards a better world of equality but that we aren’t there yet and that there are still many pesky differences between men and women in the workplace that we should try to overcome with changes in cultural practices and attitudes and perhaps with outright government mandated quotas.

There was some acceptance by the authors that there are differences between the sexes, that men and women might have different temperaments and different preferences regarding the focus on work versus the focus on the family but even when these differences were pointed out there was a tendency to blame things on discrimination and cultural stereotypes; to suggest true inborn differences between men and women was condemned as “biological determinism.” Read More »