I WAS lying on our living room sofa last night at about 11 p.m., reclining full-length on the couch and facing the front windows, which look out through tulip poplar trees and over a hill. I have been recovering from a shoulder injury and have been unable to sleep in bed because it is too painful. I was planning to stay in that spot for the night. In the distance, I could see the twinkling lights of the local mall. The retail behemoth was also in a state of quasi-slumber. The mall never really sleeps but it does rest, with its doors locked, its retail clerks dispersed along the highways and byways, its vast continent-sized parking lots empty of cars.

It was very pleasant lying there, gazing out through the trees. I said to my husband before he went to bed how much I liked falling asleep before the windows. When he left, I continued to look at the sky. (more…)

THE MURDER TRIAL of Stephanie Lazarus, the former Los Angeles police department detective who is accused of slaying her ex-boyfriend’s wife 26 years ago, continues this week. Lazarus was charged with the murder of Sherri Rasmussen in 2009. The victim’s family had unsuccessfully pleaded with detectives years ago to consider a former girlfriend of their son-in-law as a suspect. (more…)

BARTHOLOMEW writes:

AS DISCUSSED in the previous entry, energies once directed to the human race are now lavished on cats and dogs. It’s not that cats and dogs don’t deserve human kindness and attention. They just don’t deserve so much of it. Call it the sublimation of maternal instincts. Call it cultural suicide. Call it what you will, but it’s a real observable phenomenon, the extreme manifestation of which is the animal rights movement.

In this piece, an Australian writer, Ruby Hamad, argues that feminism and animal rights are virtually the same movement. Women can identify with animals, she says, because both have suffered historic oppression at the hands of men. (more…)

DARREN R. writes:

Simple question: At what point can I honestly say modern liberal society worships women?

Laura writes:

Do you think a society that requires women to negate their femaleness worships women?

Excuse my language, but modern feminism is penis envy writ large.

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  THE DISCUSSION on the excessive love of dogs (and cats) continues in the previous entry. By the way, the painting above, A Boy with Dogs and Kittens, by the artist Claude Joseph Bail, who died in 1921, does not portray anything remotely decadent. It conveys the pure joy to be found in relation to animals.

CATHERINE H. writes:

I just wanted to bring up the two Catholic presidential candidates’ lack of ashes during last night’s debate.  While Santorum attended Mass that morning and was photographed with a smear of ashes later in the day, I was nevertheless disappointed to see that he did not retain them for that night’s television appearance. (more…)

MRS. M. writes:

Recently my mother and I took my four year-old to a birthday party at a local mall. As we left the mall, I saw the strangest sight: two women in their 50s or 60s, appearing to be a “couple,” pushing baby strollers with a large pillow and a small DOG inside each one! (more…)

AT The Orthosphere, Proph makes the case against consensual politics. Democracy, he writes, is a “misrepresentation … of the nature and structure of reality”:

Existence is not reducible to a mass of equal and sovereign wills who must agree to coordinate their movements through space in order to avoid collision. Rightness and moral law are not determined by voting or even by choice; goodness is not convertible with consent; and authority, being rooted in God, transcends individual wills. Life under a consensual political system tends to inculcate its society with the delusion that “freedom” is the highest good, with the predictable consequence that the order of being, in all its determinism, comes to be regarded as oppressive and unjust. Thus, you wind up with people demanding taxpayer-subsidized elective sex change operations — how else can we be free of the tyranny of reality?

So prosperity misrepresents man’s spiritual condition, driving him to believe (falsely) that he is self-sustaining and self-actualizing; and democracy compounds the misrepresentation by driving him to believe (also falsely) that he is by nature free, that duty is an unjust imposition, authority something to be rebelled against, and reality itself something negotiable. A bad situation, indeed, and one in dire need of correction.

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  JESSE POWELL writes: A new group blog your readers will be interested in has launched! It's called The Orthosphere and, since its beginning on February 17, 2012, it has been active at a rate of three posts per day. It offers interesting commentary on religion, politics, and the various maladies of our sick culture. One thing I like about The Orthosphere is that it has a lot of testosterone and fighting spirit! It is an especially good blog for those wishing to explore spiritual and religious questions and for those interested in the political fight against liberalism.  The four contributors so far are Svein Sellanraa (Dispatches from the North), Bonald (Throne and Altar), Proph (Collapse: The Blog), and our very own Kristor. The blog bills itself as a “movement of Christian traditionalist conservatives” with the appropriate slogan, “Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists” (a quote from Joseph de Maistre).  I urge your readers to check it out!

ALAN writes:

OF ALL the Christian denominations, the Eastern Orthodox Church takes Lenten fasting the most seriously. Here are the prescribed rules, which include abstinence from meat, dairy products and fish throughout Lent and abstinence from olive oil and wine for much of it. The Orthodox Lent extends from next Monday to the Friday before Palm Sunday. (more…)

  SEE Mary's excellent comment in this entry about the Penn State coach who has allowed his players to embrace the grunge look. Like the operators of a homeless shelter who stand by while their visitors over-eat, the coach has surrendered.

THE U.S. medical establishment, operating under obvious profit-making motives, now condones the mutilation and poisoning of children and adolescents who say they are confused and unhappy with their innate sex. In the ultimate manifestation of societal hatred of male and female, “gender identity” clinics have appeared at major pediatric hospitals. These clinics have invented a devastatingly effective sales pitch, as shown in this AP story. They tell frightened and gullible parents, who may be suffering from mental illness of their own, that their confused children – boys who fantasize about being girls and girls who fantasize about being boys – may commit suicide if they don’t submit to puberty-blocking hormones and surgery. Girls as young as 16 have had their breasts cut off under the supervision of Dr. Norman Spack, of the Children’s Hospital Boston.

The denial of innate sex differences has reached the point of mass hysteria. We are in the grip of collective mental illness and medical sadism.

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GRATEFUL READER writes:

On Sunday night, my family served a meal (prepared at our church) at a homeless shelter for women in a wealthy suburban town. My husband and son worked in the kitchen while my daughter and I took orders and served and chatted with the women. (more…)