JOHN E. writes:

Megyn Kelly seems to be a sign, one of many, of women who are out-of-place. She is doing what women excel at, and accomplish so beautifully in the proper context, which is to accept another unconditionally. The problem is that there are circumstances, many circumstances in our day, for which unconditional acceptance is among the last things that are needed, and Bono’s are such circumstances. Ms. Kelly is thrusting her womanly strength onto a situation in which it has no place, and in so doing, demonstrates how this strength becomes a weakness. Read More »

THIS IS a Charles Cushman photo of three homeless men in Battery Park in June 1941. By today’s standards, these men are dressed up. It seems even homeless men once had wives to take care of them.

Looking at these other photos of New York in the 1940s, one sees how dress dignifies ordinary life.

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READING THE NEWS, you would think our economy was dead, as if America had nothing. Fred Owens writes about visiting an olive orchard in the Ojai Valley of California. It has not rained in the Ojai Valley since May and yet the olives are doing fine.

FACED WITH girls wearing skirts too short and revealing, some British schools are resorting to bans on skirts. One headmaster told the LA Times that he had no choice but to change the dress code. “It just means that teachers can concentrate on what’s important in education.”

But what could be more important?

The answer is not to ban skirts. But to make girls girls again.

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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.
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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 »