JOE LONG writes:

A nation with a sense of honor would be raging to avenge Lara Logan. None of the supposed mitigating factors would matter – no, not if she did a striptease for the crowd while chanting “I love Mubarak.” 

In 1898, reports that Spanish authorities subjected women to procedures perhaps comparable to a standard TSA “patdown” today, enraged the American public and contributed considerably to our willingness to go to war with Spain – over someone ELSE’s women, no less. Rumors of the rape of Belgian women during Germany’s WWI attacks on that nation had a similar effect. Logan, on the other hand, was not only assaulted, but assaulted AS a representative of our civilization: the visceral response of a properly socialized man ought to be unbridled wrath. Read More »

PATRICK writes:

Here is a moving testimony at The Spearhead from a man whose wife watched the movie Eat, Pray, Love. She was so affected by it she told him she no longer loved him. Eat, Pray, Love  is a toxic celebration of feelings (only destructive feelings, because non-destructive feelings e.g. gratitude, are boring); a denigration of duty, and therefore a denigration of true love. The comment is a good example of a philosophy (hedonism with a dash of nihilism) applied directly and in an unadulterated form.

However, the comments from men that follow the post are disturbing.  The appropriate reaction to evil is not to become evil oneself, but to remain moral.  Simply identify and explain the evil – and pursue the good.  To wallow in resentment and bitterness leads nowhere. 

The “anti-marriage” ideology is deeply misguided. Read More »

OUTSIDE, in the garden, it was playtime. Naked in the warm June sunshine, six or seven hundred little boys and girls were running with shrill yells over the lawns, or playing ball games, or squatting silently in two or threes among the flowering shrubs. The roses were in bloom, two nightingales soliloquized in the boskage, a cuckoo was just going out of tune among the lime trees. The air was drowsy with the murmur of bees and helicopters.

The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on a platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk; was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught.

“Strange,” mused the Director, as he turned away, “Strange to think that even in Our Ford’s day most games were played without more apparatus than a ball or two and a few sticks and perhaps a bit of netting. Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games that do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It’s madness. Nowadays the Controllers won’t approve of any new game unless it can be shown that it requires at least as much apparatus as the most complicated of existing games.”

                                               —  Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

THE ENTRY of more women into the military leads to the never-ending project of proving that the military can fairly accomodate women and prevent sexual offenses. A federal lawsuit was filed yesterday by 15 military women and two men charging that the Department of Defense does not do enough to prevent sexual assault by servicemen.

A Pentagon spokesman stated, “That means providing more money, personnel, training and expertise, including reaching out to other large institutions, such as universities, to learn best practices. This is now a command priority, but we clearly still have more work to do in order to ensure all of our service members are safe from abuse.”

The military, which can never ensure all its service members are safe from abuse, will model itself after universities in an effort to try.

Read More »

CAROLINE writes:

I’m sure you’ve heard about the Lara Logan attack and rape in Egypt. Add that to your file of women placing themselves or being placed in fantasy situations: “Gee, here I am a sexy blonde reporter babe covering a bunch of male Muslim protestors in a Muslim country. What could possibly go wrong?” 

Reality must be optional for attractive liberals; after all, we’re all the same, aren’t we? We all want the same things—freedom, as G.W. Bush would have it. And underneath, everyone is really a *good* person, donchaknow? Sharia law, what’s that? According to it, I’m an infidel and inferior . . . but, but, I’m Lara Logan. I’m beautiful and liberated; I mean well, we libs love everybody. Read More »

From "Prison Women"

[NOTE: This post contains sexually explicit material and is not appropriate for children or teenagers.]

JESSE POWELL writes:

The National Geographic Channel recently featured two shows, Prison Women, that examine the subect of female prison guards in male prisons. The settings of the programs, which will be repeated February 23, were the Miami-Dade County Jail in Florida and Dallas County Jail in Texas. 

Women prison guards in male prisons is not a fringe phenomenon. In Miami-Dade County, according to Prison Women, 52 percent of the prison guards were female.  Almost half the guards were female in Dallas County.

Prison culture has been dramatically altered by the presence of women guards, who bring new possibilities for sexual encounters into prison life. Though this was not a point made by the producers of the series, women guards also deprive men who have generally grown up in single mother homes of the male authority figures they need. Read More »

DAVID C. writes:

Are we entering the era in which men will finally begin to stand up for themselves? This is the thought I have after reading a recent article by Anthony Buono, the founder of the Ave Maria online dating website. It is called, “Are Women Unappreciative?” In the piece, Buono writes:

Many women lack the appropriate tools a woman should have to draw out the love and devotion a man is capable of when he is with a woman who treats them right.

I have heard thousands of women complain about men over the years. Many of the things they complain about are legitimate things, but much of it is not. Women have a tendency to exaggerate and over dramatize what is wrong with men. What bothers me is the bitterness and negative attitude that is expressed along with their complaints. Read More »

MY mother used to celebrate Valentine’s Day by making heart-shaped cupcakes of vanilla cake with pink boiled icing. They were beautiful and ethereal, vanilla-scented clouds of sugar, butter, and flour. They were pillows of cake, the sort of thing angels would eat if they had tea parties and buffets.

Fortunately, these extremely evanescent manifestations of my mother’s love were larger than normal cupcakes. This was good because my six siblings and I seemed to suffer from infantile metabolic disorders. Like wolves, we prowled the Siberian steppes of our existence looking for any uneaten remnant of the things we considered edible. Without any tutoring from the others or any sharing of trade secrets, we each perfected the art of removing crumbs from the exterior of a cooling cake without leaving a trace. We employed stealth and cunning in our daily search for adequate nourishment. 

The good thing about cupcakes is that, even though there technically can never be enough of them, they usually do not create questions of fairness. They are all the same size. A single cake cut into pieces, on the other hand, can be outrageously unjust, with some pieces visibly larger and more filling than others. Cupcakes are conducive to world peace. 

From a child’s perspective, fairness is important. To a child, it is sometimes inconceivable that a mother or father can love each of his children the same, that each piece of cake can be equal. A child ponders this puzzle. It is one of the first philosophical issues he wrestles with, wondering how a parent can love him like no other and also love his brother or sister like no other. The child is usually wrong in doubting the capacity of his parents to love all their children equally and exclusively, but he is right in his dawning knowledge of a painful truth. Human love is finite.  Read More »

Vasilisa the Beautiful at the hut of Baba Yaga, by Ivan Bilbin

Read More »

Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon and Christine Marinoni

Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon poses here with the newborn baby of her lover, Christine Marinoni. The Daily Mail refers to the baby, who was born last week, as the couple’s son, expecting readers to swallow nonsense whole and slide down the rabbit hole of artificially-created insanity without raising the slightest objection or cry for help.

Nixon, who plays an emotionally sterile wife in the Sex and the City movie, says, “I’m just a woman in love with another woman.” 

Despite her madonna-like pose in this photograph, Nixon is a typical anti-mother of our times, a person who has violated the most basic terms of motherhood. 

Homosexual “parents” are similar to the Baba Yagas of ancient fairy tales who stalked children in the woods.  They may not have pointy noses or broomsticks. They may not live in tiny cabins surrounded by fences made of human bones. But they are just as hostile to the young, snatching away their innocence and security, stealing them from their tiny cradles. Deliberately to deprive a child of a father, to arrange his conception the way one might arrange a major purchase, to raise him in a home without a man, cut off from half his kin and exposed to the shame of having two “mothers,” is nothing less than child abuse.

What has happened to the hearts of lesbians? They are shriveled and turned to stone.

STEVE KOGAN writes:

The King’s Speech gave me much food for thought that I would like to share with your readers. One idea, in particular, flashed through my mind several days after I saw the film and in a telling way, for it came to me all at once in the midst of my everyday routines. It was as though the film had taken on a life of its own in me, and in that moment I became aware of a wonderfully rich dynamic in the work that unfolds quietly and naturally, without ever once drawing attention to itself in any intellectualized or programmatic way. 

Knowing nothing in advance about the film except that it was about King George VI, I wondered if it would touch in any way upon his older brother David’s affair with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, their Nazi sympathies, and his brief reign before his abdication, or if anything about the king’s contribution to English morale in World War II would enter into the work. As soon as the film began, my questions fell away. Read More »

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes here:

It is necessary for traditionalists constantly to repeat the point … that liberalism/leftism consists of two main wings. These wings hate each other, and so everyone assumes that their positions are mutually opposed, but in reality the two wings both have policies which must result in the dissolution of the historic cultures and peoples of the West. Read More »

M. writes:

I wanted to pick your brain, and those of your readers, on a subject that is of some concern to me. How does one deal with the birth of a child whose illegitimacy is … planned? 

My wife’s brother and his girlfriend live in a European country, and have let us know they are planning to have a child. Read More »

SEBASTIAN C. writes:

I thought you and your readers would be interested in this rather sad piece that recently appeared in New York magazine discussing the effects of online pornography on men and women across America.

I live and date in New York (I’m divorced, mid-thirties) but flatter myself that financial security and the exclusivity it brings has shielded me from many of these horrors, though not all. There is so much wrong with what the article reveals without even reaching the main points regarding pornography: the casualness of the relations between the sexes, the androgyny, the women’s mindset regarding sex, the sheer vulgarity and ugly aesthetic of it all. And then we come to the virtual lives people, especially men, are living in lieu of physical reality. Men have always looked at “girlie magazines” – nothing wrong with that, but this is now a difference of kind. They seem to be taking refuge from something in a virtual Matrix. It’s as if the electricity and computer have replaced their spinal column.  Read More »

DALTON L. HUFF writes:

Let it first be stated that the work you have done here has been nothing less than enlightening and inspiring to a twenty-year-old college student feeling his way out of the darkness of modernism. This lonely outpost of civilization has played no small part in my transformation from a warmongering neocon to the traditionalist I am today, along with other brave standard bearers of the true Right. Sites such as this one, American Renaissance, Vdare.com, Alternative Right, and Takimag are mainstays of my daily readings. I feel I must apologizing for the tardiness of my comment on this subject, but a bout with the flu, as well as my usual college work have delayed me.

But as a Southerner, I cannot allow you and Lawrence Auster to slander the cause for which my ancestors struggled, as you have both done in the post “To My Sacred Father.”

Suggesting that the Union truly would have been ‘sundered’ in any fundamental sense is pure emotionalism. Allowing the South to depart peacefully would not have destroyed the Union at all, only made it geographically smaller. To actually assert that the absence of the South imperiled the Union is laughable. You ascribe far too much power to us!  Read More »

THE Century Association, the exclusive Manhattan club which first accepted women under the threat of legal action in 1988, has severed its relationship with a British institution, the Garrick, because the London club still refuses to admit women who are not accompanied by men.

Credit goes to the Garrick for maintaining some resistance to the demise of the cushy all-male preserve. Interestingly, according to The New York Times, hundreds of members of the Century, which is supposedly a club of intellectuals, voted against the decision and some vocally protested it. There is still some life in America.

“A man must partly give up being a man/With womenfolk,” Robert Frost wrote. It is hard to envision the rural poet in either club, but he would have appreciated the spirit of the resistance and the desire for a club where the conversation was manly. 

Perhaps someday it will be illegal for club members to disagree with women. After every statement a woman makes, the male club member will be required to say, “That is fascinating. Please tell me more” or “You are so right” or “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Read More »

THE REV. JAMES JACKSON writes:

The Chicago Tribune has a rather good article by Victor Davis Hanson on the liberal arts. 

Also, I don’t know who the painter is, but there is a charming detail on the attached painting with our Lord doing to a sacred book what other babies do.