March 17, 2011
IAN FLETCHER recently discussed his book Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace it and Why on Thom Hartmann’s TV show “Conversations with Great Minds.” You can view the program here. Fletcher criticizes what he calls the “intellectual corruption” and the “ultra mathematicization” of academic economics.
March 17, 2011
DAVID LEE MUNDY writes:
I wonder how many of the Fukushima 50, those risking their lives at the breached nuclear facility, are women?
Peter S. writes:
The apparent answer is none of them. Read More »
March 16, 2011
A Drover and a Shepherdess, Thomas Whittle, Jr. (fl. 1865-85)
TO A YOUNG LADY
Who Had Been Reproached For Taking
Long Walks In The Country
Dear Child of Nature, let them rail!
–There is a nest in a green dale,
A harbour and a hold;
Where thou, a Wife and Friend, shalt see
Thy own heart-stirring days, and be
A light to young and old.
There, healthy as a shepherd boy,
And treading among flowers of joy
Which at no season fade,
Thou, while thy babes around thee cling,
Shalt show us how divine a thing
A Woman may be made.
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee, when grey hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
— William Wordsworth
March 16, 2011
IN A discussion about the UCLA student who made a tasteless video about Asian students, Lawrence Auster writes:
White nationalists are material-racial reductionists who, like Nazis, treat race as the single all-determining factor of human existence, so that human beings are in effect automata controlled by their race. I treat race as one very important determining factor in human existence, along with many other factors. And I am not a material reductionist. Material/racial factors can be the controlling factors; for example, if you change a formerly all-white city into a half black city, certain effects will inevitably ensue. At the same time, material/racial factors are not the only factors, especially at the individual level. But the material/racial force of sheer numbers will overwhelm any individual exceptions. Read More »
March 16, 2011
Ilion T. writes:
I’ve long been amused at the silly and pretentious names developers of malls and apartment complexes (oops, it’s now “communities”) give them, especially those in the form of “The This At The That.” I think the most amusing I have yet seen is this one: “The Legends at St. Andrews.”
March 16, 2011
YOUNGFOGEY writes:
From our previous discussions of Lady Gaga, I know you are a connoisseur of music videos. I thought it might be worth drawing your attention to this one. I would love to hear your take on it. It’s for a song by Colbie Caillat. She’s known for pop songs that are melodic and peppy. She writes songs about her feelings and about boys, you know, girl stuff. This one is no different. Read More »
March 16, 2011
WRITING in The Washington Examiner, Noemie Emery pans Tina Brown’s Newsweek. She writes:
And the real news this past week is not that the fate of the Middle East swings in the balance, but that “150 women are shaking the world.” And who are the women doing this shaking?
The left-wing, the aging, and people left over from Brown’s now-dated circles of buzz. Read More »
March 15, 2011
IN the previous entry, we read a modern tale of pride and prejudice. A “Christian” woman attempts to transform her friend into another man-hating freak. Jane in our story is about as Christian as the modern pagan pictured above. Sierra Bender, who may be a perfectly nice person for all I know, is author of the book, Goddess to the Core. The ancient pagans worshipped deities in an immortal realm. The feminine divine today wears yoga pants and lives next door. Sierra’s promotional material states:
Goddess to the Core will transform you into a complete, self-assured, and well-balanced goddess. With a broad base of practical tools and spiritual inspiration, Bender gives you a workout for all four of your bodies: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. Experience how these bodies have “muscles,” and discover how neglecting them can lead to disharmony and ill health. With Bender’s “inside-out workout,” you will learn to sculpt these four bodies. By empowering, balancing, and working out each one, you will claim your worth, take command of your space, sculpt your shape, and balance your emotions and your mind while remaining in your true spiritual center—the Goddess within. Read More »
March 15, 2011
ROBIN JENNIFER writes:
When gazing upon your photo of Caroline Norton and her extraordinarily revealing facial expression, I could not help but share this tale with you, knowing that you will appreciate the fruit of Caroline Norton’s existence.
I recently had the misfortune of witnessing the following situation between Woman A. (I’ll call her Jane), and Woman B. (I’ll refer to her as Mary). Read More »
March 15, 2011
A MANHATTAN mother has filed a lawsuit against her daughter’s $19,000-a-year nursery school, charging that it failed to prepare her daughter for the entrance test necessary for admission to top private schools. According to the suit, as reported by The New York Times, “The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom.”
March 14, 2011
MARI writes:
I read with interest your post on a group who would like to protect Western civilization and its Christian heritage and influence. I am not Caucasian, but I am a Christian. Will there be a place for
those like myself who love the Lord and regard Western Civilization highly, in this society of Caucasians? I hope I have not offended you. I have always thought that I would like a place in such a society. To assure you, I am not a liberal intending on starting trouble. I have always wanted to be a part of a society which regards highly the Lord, His ways, the Constitution of the U.S.A. to name a few things. I grew up in a Muslim country and lived there for almost 18 years. And there is no place like the U.S. This is where I call home. I think multiculturalism can only work if it is based on conservative Christian principles. Otherwise, it degenerates into trouble.
March 14, 2011
CAROLINE NORTON was the mother of modern divorce in England. She actively campaigned for liberalizing divorce laws in the early Victorian era in an effort to leave her husband and retain custody of her children. She succeeded in lobbying for the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, which made it possible for mothers to procure custody of young children. She was also influential in passage of a later law transferring adjudication of marital dissolution from ecclesiastical to civil court.
I find this photograph of her intriguing. Her entire expression seems to say, “Eat my shoes!” However, Norton was opposed in some senses to the modern liberal view of marriage. “The natural position of woman is inferiority to man. Amen! That is a thing of God’s appointing, not of man’s devising. I believe it sincerely, as part of my religion. I never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality,” she wrote in The Times in 1838.
March 14, 2011
Divorced actress Sandra Bullock with her adopted son, Louis
March 14, 2011
SURELY, no president in history has spent as much time in school classrooms as President Obama, pictured here visiting a Virginia high school last week with Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. At least once a week, or so it seems, Obama pops into a public school somewhere in America. The Great Unifier believes education is the great unifier. And for many Americans, both conservative and liberal, it is. Public education is the one issue surrounded with a halo of incontestability. How could anyone begrudge more funds or more energy or more ideas devoted to our schoolchildren? How could anyone not like a man who takes the time to be with children and who wants to boost our global competitiveness? The school is the natural playground of the liberal politician. It is the place he is most at home because there he feels secure in his good intentions. Education reform is the path to political holiness.
March 13, 2011
SUPRIYO writes:
I discovered your blog quite sometime ago and have come to really admire what you have to say.
I am a 30-year-old man living in one of the bigger cities in India. I sit and watch in despair as I see many of the ills which seem to affect your society (irreversibly?) gradually come to haunt ours.
Mindless popular culture delights in taking the worst the West has to offer (e.g. I am talking reality shows, the vulgarization of newspapers), increasing divorce rates (divorce was unheard of a generation ago), adolescents engaging in promiscuous behaviour, you name it ! Something of our ancient culture still exists though but we stand as it were on the brink.
You may be surprised that even though we may be so culturally different, many of the values that you hold so dearly are exactly what we seek and idealize too. They are indeed the “common good.”
March 13, 2011
AT THE ridiculous and revolting Women in the World Summit in New York City this weekend, Hillary Clinton told Middle Eastern reformers that they must give women more political power. The Secretary of State is utterly at home telling other peoples how to order their lives. Global Oprah-ization is her objective. Women “deserve to be able to run for office, to serve as leaders and legislators, even president,” she said.
The chic summit was a cross between the Academy Awards and a global Take Back the Night rally. Read More »
March 13, 2011
THE COURAGE and desperation of the Japanese in face of the horrific tsunami is demonstrated by this story of a 60-year-old man found floating on the roof of his house ten miles out at sea. He had fled the wave, but then returned to his house to recover valuables. He and his wife were both swept away and she is still missing.
March 10, 2011
The recent item at The Thinking Housewife about the “heroic” movie house in East St. Louis provoked me into remembering the many heroic films that Hollywood produced in the decades before World War II that thrilled the audiences who attended those glorious cinemas. The movies used to belong to a healthy popular culture, which began to erode after the heady victory of 1945 and which disappeared apace in the tumult of the late 1960s. Contemporary popular culture tends to be sexually and violently gross, morally relativistic, and intellectually so degraded that its mindlessness beggars description. Recently, when I had the opportunity to teach a course on the history of American popular culture, I asked my students to watch a number of pre-1950 movies of the type that drew people out of their homes by the millions in the 1930s and 40s. One of them was The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938), directed by Michael Curtiz and starring Errol Flynn.
Ascriptions like “the greatest film ever” are dubious, but in the case of The Adventures of Robin Hood, what would usually be hyperbole seems justified. (Sample the original theatrical trailer.) If, as I argued to my students, the European directors employed by the Hollywood studios in the 1930s saw in film a continuation of grand opera on the Wagnerian model – a type of unified total artwork involving all the subordinate arts from costume- and scene-design through dramatic dialogue to musical accompaniment – then one would be hard pressed to find a more exemplary instance than the Flynn-Curtiz Robin Hood. The critic René Girard has argued that all effective narrative turns on moral conversion and that reading is itself a type of conversion experience. So it is also in film. One of the strongest recommending features of Curtiz’ superbly directed medieval epic is that the story turns on a moment when two paths of moral conversion intersect one another and intertwine. Robin must let love temper his passion for justice and Marian Fitzwalter (Olivia de Havilland) must give up her Norman superciliousness to become reconciled to the English virtues embodied by Robin. Read More »