ITALIAN women, with a total fertility rate of 1.32 children, are among the most un-fruitful women in the history of the world. Why are Italian women so infertile? Because they are spending their prime years preparing for jobs, looking for jobs, and bemoaning the lack of jobs. Judging from this article on the economic crisis in Europe, Italy will fall because women found it more interesting to work in offices, and search for the Holy Grail of jobs, than raise the next generation. If longtime readers of this site cannot peruse this article and instantly see what is wrong with it, and one obvious solution for the problems mentioned, then either I am a very lousy teacher or you all deserve to flunk.

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JESSE POWELL writes:

The National Center for Health Statistics recently released the Final Birth Data for 2008 and the Preliminary Birth Data for 2009. The most important news from these reports is that the economic crisis appears to have caused a period of social stress. This period is in some ways similar to the time from 1994 to 2003 when the growth in out-of-wedlock births radically slowed. Looking back on those years, which I earlier dubbed the “cultural conservative revival,” I have discovered that while it is true the growth in the out-of-wedlock ratio slowed markedly during that period, it is also true that the decline in the proportion of women of childbearing age who were married accelerated. Risk aversion, not a renewal of the traditional family, appears to explain both this increased preference for having children within marriage and reluctance to marry.  Read More »

MODERN-DAY CHRISTIANITY, in its noxious embrace of egalitarianism, is at war with hierarchy. To the liberal Christian, hierarchy in human relationships is evil. We are one undistinguished mass of humanity, with none naturally given to lead. 

In the recent issue of Touchstone magazine, Steven D. Boyer examines the film remakes of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. He contends the films undermine Lewis’s orthodox vision of a hierarchical world. Boyer writes:

So hierarchy, by its nature, is fundamentally good. And Lewis follows the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition by going further, by believing that the goodness of hierarchically ordered relationships extends all through the world that God has made. Relationships of all kinds are ordered, Lewis thinks, with an appropriate kind of giving and an appropriate kind of receiving. When that order is respected, real joy and freedom are the result. Read More »

THE GATES OF VIENNA recently featured a long piece by Michael Mannheimer, “Eurabia: The Planned Islamization of Europe” that is well worth reading. He wrote:

In 1960 only 600,000 Muslims lived in all of Europe, today, however, there are already over 30 million, and the greatest mass immigration in the history of man continues unabated. Read More »

FRED OWENS writes:

MAN dies in torch fire accident

ELTOPIA, Wash. (AP) — A man was killed in an accident on a farm near Eltopia.

The Franklin County sheriff’s office says 75-year-old Everett D. Monk was cutting scrap metal in a field with a torch Saturday when his clothes caught fire. The Tri-City Herald reports he apparently died of burns. Read More »

HERE is one of the most extreme cases of maternal lust ever recorded by The New York Times, which specializes in the subject, regularly valorizing the female eunuchs who exploit laboratory science and human beings in their greedy, promiscuous, unimpeded efforts to reproduce. Melanie Thernstrom, a successful, middle-aged author, contracts with one female donor for eggs (that’s human eggs) and with two other women for gestational services. These two surrogates simultaneously carry to term the artificially conceived offspring. Here we have the apotheosis of liberal reproduction. The collective conceives. The village gives birth. Read More »

THE RECENT repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” requires the military for the first time in American history to condone homosexuality in the armed forces. Lawrence Auster describes the lack of principled resistance to its repeal as the greatest of many conservative betrayals in recent years. He writes:

Seventeen years ago conservatives stood like a stone wall against Clinton’s attempt to open the military to homosexuals, and won. Today, they don’t give a damn, and stand indifferent and detached in the face of this portentous victory for the homosexual rights movement, a victory which opens up incalculable new opportunities for the homosexualization of American life and institutions. Read More »

Johann Strauss, Jr. and Brahms

WE MAY not have the opportunity to dance the waltzes of Johann Strauss, Jr., but we can revel in the joy and romance of his musical genius on New Year’s Day. Brahms said he would do anything to have written a single Strauss melody. Richard Strauss, not related to the famous Strauss family, said of Johann II:

Of all the God-gifted dispensers of joy, Johann Strauss is to me the most endearing. This first, comprehensive statement can serve as a text for everything I feel about this wonderful phenomenon. In particular, I respect in Johann Strauss [Jr.] his originality, his innate gift. At a time when the whole world around him was tending towards increased complexity, increased reflectiveness, his natural genius enabled him to create from the whole. He seemed to me the last of those who worked from spontaneous inspiration. Yes, the primary, the original, the proto-melody — that’s it. Read More »

MATTHEW writes from Italy:

Thank you for your wonderful site which I log into daily. I am a male of our species, left a year ago by my wife after 20 years of marriage and an 11-year-old daughter for an all-consuming passionate love affair with our neighbour’s son, who left his own wife and two boys to pursue my wife.

Your site is a breath of fresh air and sanity in a world gone mad! God bless you.

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JOE LONG writes:

G.K. Chesterton’s “Ballad of the White Horse” expresses the spirit of virtuous defiance described in the previous entry. In the poem, King Alfred, facing an apparently unstoppable Viking invasion, sees a vision of Mary, who promises him…nothing.  In response to his request for a prophecy telling him whether he can succeed in his last ditch defense, she responds,
 
          “…you and all the kind of Christ
          Are ignorant and brave,
          And you have wars you hardly win
          And souls you hardly save.

          “I tell you naught for your comfort,
          Yea, naught for your desire,
          Save that the sky grows darker yet
          And the sea rises higher. Read More »

IN THIS ENTRY, Sage McLaughlin writes:

It is very encouraging … that there are people who continue to struggle, even though we’re hounded and hated for it. In Tolkien’s mythology, the Men who were loyal to the gods of their fathers were called the Faithful, and they were despised by the King’s Men, who hated the old gods, most especially for their refusal to allow mortal Men into paradise. Eventually the wrath of the gods destroyed their civilization, but some few of the Faithful survived to rise again (Aragorn of the Rings story was of that line). I believe that was Tolkien’s hope for the West. If there was an abiding theme in his work, it was that we are obliged to go forward even in the absence of hope, because none of us knows who bears the seeds of a new beginning, and none of us can see to the end of all things. 

This is all we have, in the end, unless we want to become complicit in the doom of Christendom. So I’m happy that men like Nathan trudge ahead, bearing some ember of the light of Truth with them along the way.

Woman Plucking a Duck (1656), Nicholas Maes

I SAW this beautiful painting by the Dutch artist Nicholas Maes yesterday and, to me, it conveyed the dark ambivalence that may afflict anyone who has engaged in many days of Christmas cooking. The spilled fruit, stalking cat and gun propped against the wall might be interpreted as looming death and disorder, repressed sexuality or, to the postmodern critic, stultifying domestic tyranny, but, under the influence of the season, I viewed them as representative of the cook’s state of mind, which might be summed up in the words, “To heck with it, let the cat eat the bird.”   

JAMES P. writes:

Diana wrote of the “right to reproduce” and of the absurdity of homosexual couples having children genetically their own. She terms this madness that she doesn’t believe will ever happen. But it is already happening! This story relates that 63-year-old Elton John and his male “partner” have had a child via a surrogate mother. Frankly I find everything about this story repulsive, but that’s the world we live in — what seemed like unthinkable madness yesterday is the reality of today.

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The Snow Storm (1859), William Morris Hunt

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snows, and driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.

                                             Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snow-Storm”

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DIANA writes:

I’m sorry to bother you with so many e-mails so suddenly, but the post about suffering and how people write to you really touched me. Here is my story. I leave a lot out, of course.

My oldest brother is 12 years older than I am. He’s schizophrenic. I can hardly remember him as a normal young man, but I do have some memories. For most of my life, he’s been a terrible burden and a shame. He is subject to fits of rage and violence. (I had a lot of therapy sessions devoted to dealing with this. They all boiled down to: forget about him and save yourself.)

But the bedrock of his personality is an overwhelming sweetness. He’s actually the sweetest person in my family. I’m not just an addled family member who can’t see the bad in her brother. It’s true. He’s a sweetheart. He couldn’t believe that 9/11 was caused by terrorists. I called him afterwards to calm him down. He was fine. “No one would do that on purpose!” he said to me. Read More »

DIANA WRITES:

So Joe Biden says that “same-sex marriage” is inevitable. Well, we shall see about that. Do you remember the Equal Rights Amendment? That too was inevitable, but under the passionate generalship of Phyllis Schlafly, it died.

But let’s think about the consequences if a distracted and beaten-down public is unable to summon enough opposition to homosexual marriage. Did you know that there is something called “a right to reproduce”? And that intellectuals have written articles in law reviews about this? This boils down to homosexuals changing laws to foster surrogacy, and to throw money into more “ART” – assisted reproductive techniques that might enable homosexual couples to bear children who are genetically their own. Read More »

MY AUNT MARY, who is now 80, was stunningly beautiful when she was younger. She had golden hair that she kept long and rolled into a French twist at the back of her head. The sunny yellow of her hair complimented her fair skin perfectly. When her hair began to gray, she started to color it herself to keep it blonde and she continued to wear it in the exact same elegant style. Her hair was obviously very important to her. She once told me she did not swim in the pool in her backyard because the chlorine would destroy her coloring. Read More »

PESSIMISM is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.

                                                           — G. K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man