THE TORNADOES that touched down in the Southeast on Wednesday and Thursday were among the deadliest in U.S. history. The winds are believed to have exceeded 300 miles an hour. Among those killed was Tom Lee, a father of 13 children in Alabama. A tornado hit a community of Christian homeschooling families. The home of Kelly Crawford, of Generation Cedar, was destroyed while 25 children and several adults huddled in the basement.

AT HER blog Home Living, Lydia Sherman argues that it is is wrong for a man to ask his wife to work. She writes:

There was a time when most people on the earth, even those not religious at all, would not argue about the women being allowed to stay home and be in charge of the inner workings of the household. Most people thought it was as natural as breathing the air. Read More »

HOW MANY WOMEN in the world are madly, passionately, overwhelmingly, heart-stoppingly in love with the deceased economist and social thinker Friedrich Hayek? Here is one.

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THERE are many trashy books that do not deserve to be read. Still there’s something profoundly unsettling about the use of books for interior decorating.

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A CONNECTICUT mother faces charges of fraud because she lied about where she was living in order to get her son into a better public school. The mother is black and the school she had enrolled her son in was largely white. So intense is the drive to prove the deliberate denial of education to blacks that the mother, Tanya McDowell, is hailed as a hero. Peter Applebome reports in The New York Times:

The tale outlined outside court by the defendant’s supporters had a heartbreaking story line — a child tossed out of school, a homeless mother charged with felony theft for the crime of sending him to a better school than the one available to her, the inequalities that define America’s schools.

The boy was not tossed out of school. He was asked to leave one school and attend another. His mother, as Applebome later notes, also faces serious drug charges, suggesting that the boy’s most pressing problem may have nothing to do with his education, and she was not homeless. And “the inequalities that define America’s schools” are not due to unequal funding, as Applebome later states. They are due to differences that are both innate and cultural.

A recent report by Jason Richwine for the Heritage Foundation on “The Myth of Racial Disparities in Public School Funding” rebuts this widespread assumption. Richwine writes: Read More »

A YOUNG MALE READER writes:

Men’s clothing has not fared any better. Any given article of traditional men’s clothing is marked by loyalty to custom and accrued wisdom. Yet an assembly of them betrays an incredible variety of textures and origins, the fruit of trade and empire. The offerings are more cosmopolitan than a U.N. convention: Norwegian sweaters, Hebrides tweeds, English tattersalls, Indian madras, Shetland sweaters, Cordoban leather, Peruvian Alpaca… Each bears the mark of its maker, who may come from any corner. And yet, such wares are branded as provincial and elitist. Read More »

TINA BROWN, who has made Newsweek even less interesting than it was before, applies the predictable amount of contempt to the subject of the pending royal marriage. Of Kate Middleton, she writes:

Now that she’s engaged to be married to the second in line to the throne, her life is about to get more boring still. The palace machine will take over. The portcullis will come down. William is a RAF search-and-rescue helicopter pilot at RAF Valley on the island of Anglesey, and the happy couple will live in a remote farmhouse in North Wales, where there is 33 inches of rain a year. There she can tend to the urgent priority of royal wife, the speedy manufacture of the heir and spare.

Ah, yes. It would be far less boring if Kate Middleton occupied some corporate position churning out propaganda or attending conventions for chief executive goddesses. Raising an heir to an ancient throne, how deadly dull.

MODESTY is not the same as prudery, as is discussed in this entry. A reader also suggests retailers that sell more modest women’s clothing than what is generally available and vintage clothes, including the dress above.

McDONALD’S has introduced a new program called 365Black. The company states, “[W]e believe that African-American culture should be celebrated 365 days a year – not just during Black History Month.”

Lawrence Auster writes:

So McDonald’s has turned itself into an officially race-conscious organization which promotes blacks as blacks, and blackness as blackness. This is in line with the de facto American ideology of all-pervasive race-blindness and zero racial identity for whites, combined with all-pervasive race-consciousness and maximum racial identity for nonwhites. The Civil Rights idea, ML King’s Dream, in which everyone is race-blind and each person is seen as an individual, is long gone—except when it is cynically used to push whites to be race-blind while encouraging nonwhites to be race-conscious. Read More »

 AT HER blog Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat reflects on the fashion world’s committment to ugliness and the celebration of the drab and ugly in modern dress. She writes:

 As I ponder more on what I’ve written [on this subject], I think the underlying premise is equality. We are all equal in our intelligence, our talents, our luck, our wealth, our youth (age), and of course our beauty. We are all beautiful. But, in order to make this equality a reality, we have to subscribe to the lowest common denominator. After all, it is much easier to lower the standards of beauty (how low can we get before we call it ugly?) than to reach for the higher echelons of beauty; it is much easier to make our young look old and haggard, to come to our level, since we can never look young and beautiful as only they can. This is the prescription to equality that we have been fed. But we don’t have to accept it.

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THE singer and songwriter Phoebe Snow, who occupied a musical category of her own and was a big hit in the 70s, died yesterday at the age of 60. According to the New York Times, Snow said her greatest accomplishment in life was caring for her daughter, who was born with severe brain damage and died at the age of 31 in 2007.

IMAGINE an article in a mainstream newspaper celebrating the freedom of heterosexual men to obtain sexual gratification outside normal relations with women. I have never seen a mainstream ad or newspaper piece ooh-ing or aah-ing over male use of prostitutes or pornography. And, yet it is now normal to read about how wonderful sex toys and auto-eroticism are for women. 

This recent piece in The New York Times about the marketing of vibrators in drug stores and online sites is a case in point. This puff piece would have been unthinkable 50 years ago – but that, we are told, is good. There is not a single cautionary word in the entire article. No acknowledgment of the potential for sex addiction in women. The past was one long siege of repression and now women are liberated to achieve sexual ecstasy outside intercourse or even a relationship with a man.

Vibrators come in perfume boxes and can be programmed by an Ipod. Who would ever have thought that giving one to a teenager daughter was anything less than generous? “A woman who has thoroughly explored her own body, both alone and with or without whichever toys she finds interesting, makes for a significantly better lover.” The vibrator is neat, “an ongoing source of fascination,” the road to freedom after millenia of darkness, not a crude device that subverts love and creates hours of easy, impersonal sex that is immoral and undermines appreciation of the real thing.

Women have traded love and early marriage for bedtime with a dime store contraption. Read More »

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY British painter John Atkinson Grimshaw is known for his urban scenes with the moon glowing on dockyards and city streets or the amber glow of shop windows visible in the sooty nightfall. His paintings, 50 of which are now on display in a gallery in London, are unusual in the poetic beauty they ascribe to industrial settings. As Hermes Westbury wrote:

John Atkinson Grimshaw was fascinated by modern industry, frequently painting the commercial centres of Leeds, Liverpool, Glasgow, Scarborough and Hull. He painted at night, using moonlight to transform the sooty reality of the industrial North into an image of romance and mystery: air thick with pollution becomes an atmospheric mist enveloping the dark figures; moonlight reflects off cobbles, glistening with recently fallen rain; long shadows are thrown across the foreground by the golden lights illuminating the shop fronts.

Grimshaw’s works now fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars each. The painter, however, was not rich. His wife gave birth to 16 children, ten of whom died in childhood, and he struggled to support his large family.

Liverpool, John Atkinson Grimshaw

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IN A 2007 post at her blog Tea at Trianon, Elena Maria Vidal explored the origin of the phrase “Let them eat cake,” widely attributed to Marie Antoinette with little basis in fact. Vidal wrote:

Marie-Antoinette never said any such thing …. One theory about the origins of the legend of the phrase “Let them eat cake” is that it is the misunderstanding of a passage from the memoirs of the Comte de Provence (Louis XVIII), the brother of Louis XVI. Provence and his wife escaped from Paris to Coblenz by post-chaise in June, 1791. They stopped to eat and had meager provisions. Provence makes the allusion to a remark made by the queen of Louis XIV, Maria Theresa of Spain, in this passage: Read More »

AT the website Minding the Campus, Mary Grabar writes about her experience at a major convention of college-level composition teachers. She reports:

After spending four depressing days this month at a meeting of 3,000 writing teachers in Atlanta, I can tell you that their parent group, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is not really interested in teaching students to write and communicate clearly. The group’s agenda, clear to me after sampling as many of the meeting’s 500 panels as I could, is devoted to disparaging grammar, logic, reason, evidence and fairness as instruments of white oppression. They believe rules of grammar discriminate against “marginalized” groups and restrict self-expression. Read More »