THE EDMONTON SUN ran this photo the other day with the following caption:

A light-hearted photo by the Edmonton’s Sun chief photographer Tom Braid is the Photo of the Week choice. The trend of destroying the wedding dress as part of a bride’s photo album has emerged within the last decade, and this very bubbly, fun photo will no doubt become a centrepiece of this bride’s memories for years to come. Read More »

AT VFR, the commenter Gintas writes the following about the Center for Gender and Sexuality and its well-paid commissars:

The sexual revolution is a sexual boot camp–tear down the old man, rebuild him in a new image, a new man totally obedient to new masters. The goal is to sweep away all virtue, truth, beauty, and turn man in every way into a rutting animal with no thought above his immediate urges. Does not Katherine Franke herself talk like that, but with the obfuscating Cultural Marxism of a modern educrat? And does not the faculty of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality look like the drill instructors of the sexual boot camp?

A READER, Joe, sent this note today to Megyn Kelly of FoxNews:

At lunch, I got bored watching CNBC and Fox Business so I flipped the news channels to your program. Your interaction with [Dr. Keith] Ablow was astounding. Mind blowing. 

You militantly argued with him, invoking that damnable “hater” terminology of the Bolsheviks, about Chastity Bono and (her) appearance on some dancing program.  Read More »

The Lost Shepherd, Richard Ansdell (1860)

FROM British Paintings.

ERIC writes:

If Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke thinks “the public sphere may be the last refuge for sexual liberty,” she must never have seen the Folsom Street Fair. And if she ever tells me that our discourse needs to be any raunchier, I will tell her to [obscenity deleted.] I bet that line would make a schoolmarm out of her. Read More »

MODERN DENTISTRY is remarkable. Everytime I go to the dentist – and lately I have been there a lot – the instruments of torture have been streamlined and updated. It’s true that the jackhammer used to blow a tooth to smithereens is not much quieter than the jackhammers of yesteryear. But many other things are different. Read More »

HERE is the faculty of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality. Eleven full professors comprise the center’s staff, easily totaling more than a $1 million in annual salaries. The center doesn’t feel the need to mask its partisan agenda with a token white male. There is one male and he is, of course, black.

By the way, Katherine Franke (pictured to the far right) is director of the Gender and Sexuality Program. She recently called for a new frontier in homosexual activism: public sex. She worries that the legalization of same-sex “marriage” in New York has stigmatized promiscuity. Therefore, homosexuals need to be more publicly and openly sexual. She writes, Read More »

WHAT nation has the most egalitarian workforce, with the least occupational segregation of men and women? Is it one of the many countries that have tried to accomodate mothers in the workforce with family-friendly policies, such as paid parental leave? Is it Sweden or Norway with their enlightened equality policies? Read More »

THIS boy is one of six students listed as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a Minnesota school district accused of a dismissive attitude toward “antigay bullying.” The Anoka-Hennepin school district, the largest in the state, refuses to teach “sexual diversity” to its students. Read More »

I HIGHLY recommend Kristor’s most recent comments on trade policy, which offer a coherent, traditionalist approach to foreign competition. To call Kristor’s views “libertarian” is grossly inaccurate. He recognizes the integrity of the community and its duty to protect members from economic harm.

Since it is difficult to read his points in the current format, I have chosen a few excerpts to highlight here:

Freedom does not mean lack of constraint; it depends upon proper constraint of what would otherwise be mere chaos. Only in the context of such constraints can behaviour be orderly (or therefore either good or bad). Determining the nature and bound of proper constraint is the basic matter of political discourse. Mercantilists get the constraints wrong at one extreme; doctrinaire libertarians at the other. Mere liberty does not suffice to order a society, because it does not suffice to order a life. But central planning overdetermines on the basis of inherently insufficient data, and thus leads to grotesque errors of resource allocation… Read More »

BOB writes:

The entire free trade discussion is wrong-headed. We are in a transition in manufacturing technology that will eventually eliminate almost all manufacturing jobs. Someday, working in a factory will be as common as working on a farm. The real economic question is, how do we distribute the wealth created by manufacturing if there are no workers in the factories? Read More »

DIANA writes:

Sometimes I feel as if I am living in a country that’s been hijacked. Pretty much everything has become “365 black.”

This has happened even to tennis. I watched the women’s final of the U.S. Open yesterday because I was certain Serena Williams would lose – and she did! I am not alone in despising Williams. It was a wonderful moment. But not without some drama, as I will relate.
Read More »

THE DISCUSSION on free trade continues here, with comments from additional readers and a very lengthy response to his critics from Kristor, who concludes his argument with this:

From my point of view, protectionists are urging us to slap a big Ace bandage over an open gangrenous wound. The rot in our culture goes deep. In dealing with our fix, trade war should be the last weapon we use, not the first. The first thing we should do is eliminate the absurdities in our own system. Let the Chinese continue to fund the absurdities in theirs. Most likely, they’ll end up like the last unstoppable mercantilist Asian Tiger we used to be all worried about: Japan. Remember when Reagan and Thatcher were just rolling up their sleeves, and the common wisdom was that the Japanese were about to take over the world? Then Reagan and Thatcher tweaked a few things in a rational direction, and we took off – while Japan cratered.

Kristor’s comments appear below in full. Thank you to all of the readers who have taken the time to discuss this important subject so knowledgeably. Read More »

“WE WILL NEVER FORGET” is both a beautiful and an ugly phrase. We should embrace it and utterly reject it.

“We will never forget” is beautiful in the sense that we will never forget those who died on 9-11 or the heroes of that day and its immediate aftermath. And, we will never forget the suffering of their survivors. I will never forget, and could never forget, the horror of that morning.

“We will never forget” is beautiful in the sense that it calls on us to remember the truth, specifically the truth revealed to us again on September 11. Islam is a false and dangerous faith. It threatens to destroy us. If we honor the dead, we will not just realize this truth in words, but act upon it and take it seriously. Read More »

LAURENCE BUTLER, a reader of this site, is the author of the following essay, which was written for an essay contest held by the Libertarian ISI group in Virginia. The topic of the contest was, “Can Character and Community Survive in an Age of Globalization?” Mr. Butler’s response was, in so many words, “No, they can’t.”  The essay is relevant to the recent discussions here on free trade and, though it is quite lengthy, I think readers will enjoy it and so I am posting it in its entirety.

Read More »

THE DISCUSSION of free trade continues. Many readers passionately argue that economic ideologues have caused the catastrophic de-industrialization of America.

A reader in the latest thread writes:

I have a B.A. in economics, something I am profoundly ashamed of. I have most of a Masters in Econ and did some courses with Murray Rothbard who was a spellbinding lecturer and like Milton Friedman had a simple, clear, brilliant, wrong answer for every complex question. Economists have spectacularly failed to predict or forestall two massive economic bubbles, two recessions and worsening unemployment (that’s just in the last 10 years). My own view is that the discipline is corrupt. Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes: 

Divorce has risen greatly since the government began to keep reliable statistics on the subject in 1870. In 1870, the divorce rate, the number of divorces divided by the number of marriages in any given year, was a mere 3.3 percent. This rate rose to 8.1 percent in 1900 and to 13.4 percent in 1920. The divorce rate rose continually in America from 1870 up until 1975, when it hit near 50 percent, and then, mysteriously, stopped rising any further. All the way from 1975 up until 2009, the most recent year available, the divorce rate has remained remarkably constant hovering around 50 percent during the entire time. 

Does this mean that family life in America as regards the issue of marriage and divorce is now stable? Did America enter a permanent plateau in its divorce rate after this rate had risen continuously for 100 years? 

The first thing I wish to point out is that prolonged stability in any social indicator, especially one as important as divorce, is highly abnormal. The cultural environment in America at the present time is anything but stable so an indicator such as the divorce rate being stable over an extended period of time is almost certainly due to conflicting forces working against each other that balance each other out. What is happening on the surface appears to be stable but what is happening underneath the surface certainly is in a process of great change.  Read More »