Shirley Temple leaves the White House with her mother, 1938

THE March issue of Chronicles magazine includes “Going Down with the Good Ship Lollipop,” an excellent, first-rate piece by Jack Trotter on Shirley Temple, whose stardom the writer identifies as the beginning of popular culture’s explicit sexualization of children. Countering those who might protest that the tap-dancing little girl in embroidered frocks was nothing like today’s Britneys and Mileys, Trotter describes the dark, prurient side of her appeal.

“[M]illions of Americans embraced Shirley without so much as a murmur of disapproval,” he writes. In the piece, unavailable online, Trotter recalls the novelist Graham Greene’s observations of Miss Temple in his film reviews:   Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

I had an interesting experience walking home this evening. I was standing at a busy intersection patiently waiting for the crossing sign to turn green. I had hit the button signaling that I wanted to cross and was waiting. It was already dark and had been dark for about an hour. On the opposite side of the street a young woman, about 30 years old and well dressed, quite attractive, white, stepped into the street. When I first saw her do this I thought she was confused, that she didn’t know that the light was red; maybe she thought she saw a green light and just wasn’t very aware of her surroundings. Read More »

STEPHEN writes:

With regard to yesterday’s post on the “Meditations of Nicolas Goméz Dávila,” I would like to offer one small correction to what your correspondent (Peter S.) wrote, or at least prevent a potential misunderstanding on the part of your readers. Goméz Dávila wrote well over 3,000 aphorisms — the total is, I believe, somewhere around 14,000. Rather, I only translated approximately 3,000 of his aphorisms into English on Don Colacho’s Aphorisms.

Laura writes:

So you only translated 3,000 of his aphorisms? That’s all? 

Seriously, that is impressive. Congratulations and thank you for your effort. In celebration, I’d like to post a few of my favorite of Goméz Dávila’s aphorisms on love: Read More »

MICHAEL D. writes in response to this entry:

The last occasion when the United States attacked Libya was in 1986 in Operation El Dorado Canyon. This operation consisted of a series of air strikes by air force and navy strike aircraft where they struck regime targets in Tripoli and Benghazi. President Reagan announced the operation to the public while the planes were in the air – the strikes were in reprisal for a bomb attack by Libyan terrorists on a nightclub in Berlin that was packed with many U.S. servicemen and civilians at the time. Read More »

I REALIZE military commanders are under certain restrictions when coming up with code names for strategic operations, but still it is embarrassing to see an armed conflict assigned such a silly, euphemistic term in the news as “Operation Odyssey Dawn.” Even if military personnel refer to it as such, is it necessary for the public and journalists to accept the term? The rash mindlessness and indefinite purpose of this country’s attack on Libya, launched without Congressional approval, is sickeningly highlighted by the sentimental name. Ed O’Keefe in The Washington Post says the phrase sounds like “the title of a rock album, video game or — as some have suggested — the name of a pornographic movie star.” Read More »

PETER S. WRITES:

Today marks the completion of a multi-year informal translation project of the aphorisms of Don Colacho.  A profound reactionary intellectual, his observations, while no doubt acerbic to some tastes, are full of penetrating insight regarding the modern condition and the eclipse of the sacred.  Of the nearly three thousand aphorisms authored by him, I offer a few here by way of example: 

We do not invoke God as defendants, but as parched lands. 

Today the individual must gradually reconstruct inside himself the civilized universe that is disappearing around him. 

I do not belong to a world that is passing away; I prolong and transmit a truth that does not die. 

The Gospels and the Communist Manifesto are waning; the world’s future lies in the power of Coca-Cola and pornography.

TODAY is Johann Sebastian Bach’s birthday. Celebrate by listening to this beautiful version of the Bach Concerto in F minor, with Claudio Dauelsberg on the piano.

Bach means “brook” in German. Beethoven said, “Not Brook, but Ocean should be his name.”  Bach is a vast and glorious sea that stretches to the horizon.

Read More »

KILROY M. writes:

This from NineMSN in Australia brought a smile to my face: “Casey’s father Colin said he was proud his son has finally stood up to the bullying, and the support Casey had received had already changed his son’s demeanour and self-esteem.”  Read More »

THE LATEST DISCUSSION on free trade has been particularly interesting. One reader in that entry made the point that capital raised in offshore industry is reinvested in our economy and leads to further innovation and new industries at home. In response, the reader R.S. writes:

And that productive capital can in future be invested in places that are not the United States, for exactly the same reasons that productive capital has been invested in existing industries, in places that are not the United States, and exactly the same reasons that productive capital is being invested in new industries, in places that are not the United States.

He also writes:

[N]o serious thinker believes that a large nation can maintain itself, defend itself, and prosper as a “service economy.” Shills, hacks, CNBC screechers, Timothy Geithner, professors at George Mason, and Economist leader-writers, yes, but not serious people. Read More »

A man grieves in front of the wreckage where his mother's body was buried by the waves.

SEE The New York Times’s remarkable slide show of the aftermath of the tsunami and earthquake in Japan.

LAST WEEK, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton; Samantha Powers, of the National Security Council; and Susan Rice, ambassador to the United Nations, were all influential in convincing President Obama to order up military plans for an attack on Libya. The New York Times describes their efforts to convince the president on the necessity for intervention. 

Suffragists and feminists often claimed that women would bring world peace if they could only get the reins of power. That’s because suffragists and feminists misunderstood how a powerful woman might react to a supposed “humanitarian crisis.” It’s not excessive aggression that drives women to unnecessary war, but excessive compassion.

IN THIS previous thread, Van Wijk writes:

It is no secret that the majority of American Jews are leftists; so are a great many whites. Since leftist Jews are in most cases racially and culturally white, and since they are too few and pacifistic to pose a physical threat, they can be lumped in with white leftists as a whole and dealt with in the same manner. The problem with the Jew-haters is that they tend to ignore or play down the danger posed by demonstrably violent peoples. Solve the problem of Jewish influence, they say, and all other problems will solve themselves. Every time I’ve asked a Jew-hater what to do about Mestizos or Muslims, the response has been that they can be dealt with “in a straightforward manner.” No one but the Jews are on the Jew-hater’s radar, and Jews are (naturally) responsible for most of the evil in the world. …. Since Jewish influence looms large in the mind of the Jew-hater and can never be resolved while there is a single Jew in the land, to engage them is to be drawn into what Mark Richardson calls an “intellectual cul-de-sac.” Read More »

R.S. WRITES:

One commenter in the previous discussion mentioned Toyota, I would like to hold that company up to the claim made by another reader that protectionism always leads to shoddy union practices and inferior products. Interested readers might like to review the history of that superlative manufacturer when evaluating theoretical objections to protectionism. Read More »

EARLIER THIS week, I recommended a new website Faith and Heritage.  I regret my hasty enthusiasm for a new venture. Disappointingly, Faith and Heritage is beset with the same viral tendency that afflicts many sites that defend white heritage: anti-Semitism.

In a review of the movie Social Network, the blogger “Generation 5” writes at Faith and Heritage:

Zuckerberg is a particularly pathological character, of course, but he is an extreme archetype of Jews, particularly those hailing from Eastern Europe where the hatred of Gentiles was most acidic. If the Winklevoss had inherited some of their ancestors’ old-fashioned anti-Semitism, they would have known that it’s generally a bad idea to do business with Jews. Lacking the Christian sense of fair play and good sportsmanship (that even nominal, cultural Christians like the Winklevoss still largely possess, and reinforced through athletics), nursing resentments against our culture and people, the temptation to cheat is almost impossible for them to overcome. The lesson for Christians is simple: avoid dealings with Jews, for they are too risky.  Read More »

THE DISCUSSION about white nationalism, which began here, continues below.

Boris S. writes:

The essential difference between the so-called “white nationalist” tribalism and the organization of Jews, which the “white nationalists” seek to emulate, is that the Jews point to a common four-thousand-year-old religion, with a shared culture, historical memory, and transcendental hopes. The “white nationalists,” on the other hand, want to impose a totally new tribal organization, invented out of thin air, on a group that has never constituted—that is, never saw itself as—a single nation, people, or tribe. “Whites” are not, and never have been, a people, in the sense that one speaks of the “Jewish people.”  Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes: 

A number of the reader comments in the post on free trade struck me as clear-sighted. Take, for example, this one:

 “[T]he U.S. and other Western countries are importing goods from other countries that are cheaper than we can produce not because of any natural comparative advantage, but because those countries do not have the same laws and regulations regarding such things as environmental regulations, workplace health and safety, minimum wage laws and the like. To the extent that such laws and regulations are morally necessary (some but not all cases, in my opinion), we are getting cheap goods at the moral cost of patronizing companies, which treat their workers and environment in ways that we have deemed wrong and would not tolerate at home.” 

The “Free Trade” argument has always seemed to me grossly reductive. It says, in effect: “Look here, we can manufacture a doohickey for x dollars whereas the Laputans can manufacture it for 1/2x dollars; therefore let us stop manufacturing doohickeys so that we may buy them more cheaply from the Laputans.” Read More »