AS I WROTE in this entry, there is a basic misunderstanding about the public library’s democratic mission. The library now strives to be all things to all people. Technological change is also rapidly altering the library’s role. The library of the past is gone, but books are still the main purpose. Traditionally, a library preserves the highest. In the way, a local nature center or arboreteum protects precious wildlife or flora, a library should protect the rare and the beautiful. When the giants of the past no longer hover in the shadows, a library has all the charm of a bus station.

Kristor writes:

Any institution that orders itself in respect to the lowest common denominator will end up like the DMV. The only way a public institution can avoid the eventual heat death of utter disorder is to aim at, and insist upon, excellence: excellence in its employees, and excellence in its clients. This is true also for private institutions like churches, business enterprises and universities. The only way they can succeed over the long run is to aim at excellence. The elite universities are pretty good examples of how this is done, although they have fallen far since they began to value diversity and political correctness more than excellence and truth. Another good example: the Rangers, or for that matter any of the special forces.

Excellence is essentially inegalitarian. If a society has anything good in it, it is to that extent inegalitarian. Read More »

THE MATURE TULIP POPLAR (Liriodendron tulipfera), if given the space to spread and more than 75 years of growth, is a magnificent tree. Its truncate-retuse leaves look like heraldic emblems. They turn lemon yellow in the fall and make a splattering sound as they hit the ground, as if someone is pouring splotches of yellow paint. A few days later,  the leaves are brown. They bring to mind these words from Robert Frost’s poem “Reluctance:”

Ah, when to the heart of man
     Was it ever less than treason
To go with the drift of things,
      To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
      Of a love or a season?

GARY NORTH, an economist and social conservative, posted some interesting reflections on the Tea Party at his site. The movement lacks a real leader, he writes, and that is an asset. Its libertarian side will probably fade with time and it will become a growing force in politics. He predicts that it will be led by the best and brightest of homeschooled adults who are accustomed to rejecting the mainstream.

He describes ten key facts about the Tea Party. I reprint the article in its entirety below: Read More »

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA will offer a sociology course next year on Lady Gaga. The professor teaching the course brags about it in The New York Times, as if the course sets him apart from the pack. In fact, what he is doing is utterly conventional. Popular culture courses are a dime a dozen. The professor also admits to being entranced with Gaga, an out-of-control fan who has traveled around the world to see her concerts and started a fan website devoted to her.

Read More »

FITZGERALD writes:

I went to our public library with my youngest son recently and was horrified by the book selection. I haven’t darkened a library in years thanks to Amazon.com’s used book service and I’m glad because the bias was more apparent than ever. First, the rulers of the library fiefdom were a group of frumpy, angry crones. Then, scanning through a number of sections in the “non-fiction” area I found a 9-1 preponderance of outright Marxist or feminist texts, books like Sexual Violence and the American Male.  The ideas being drummed into the masses in public education, libraries, colleges, etc. are destroying the fabric of society. It’s truly sad. Being a busy professional I’ve opted out of the public education racket, protecting my kids to the best of my ability without locking them up and helping other parents to do the same. My brief jaunt to the library just reinforced how bad things really are. I will not be going back, and the closest my children will be to the library will be the used bookstore down the street. Read More »

IN THIS shocking recorded speech, President Obama addresses teenagers who consider themselves homosexual, visually embracing them with his love and telling them in soothing tones that their differences are “a source of pride.”

“There is a whole world waiting for you filled with possibilities,” Daddy O. says. “There are people who love you just the way you are… Don’t feel like you’re in this by yourself… your differences are a source of pride and a source of strength.”

Our president is a bully who flagrantly violates his mandated role. The U.S. Constitution did not appoint him therapist to the nation’s children. The voters did not elect him to be dad. This is an outrageous assertion of power. He is a bully to parents in their own homes and a bully to children as well, exhibiting shocking insensitivity to the dilemmas and conflicts of adolescence and feeding them blatant lies. This president is a bully and a sentimental idiot all at once. He is an embarrassment to everything good this country represents.

Read More »

The small town of Castellammare di Stabia near Naples has imposed fines on women who wear tiny miniskirts, extremely revealing tops and low-slung jeans. The mayor of the town, Luigi Bobbio, said not all miniskirts are affected by the ordinance passed last weekend, “just the really slutty ones.”

According to Blast Magazine, Bobbio said, “the skirt is absolutely allowed and permitted. The regulation, how easily you can guess if you do not fall into the easy manipulation, is not aimed at banning this or that piece of clothing, but to give the city and precise coordinates of the citizens of civilized behavior to respect the freedom of each and therefore the freedom of all. ” His point in this mangled translation appears to be that too much exposed skin undermines a sense of order. Read More »

THE DAILY MAIL examines the trend of British career women converting to Islam. Many of them do so after dating a Muslim man. Some describe their sense of higher purpose after their conversion.  

By the way, Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law, converted to Islam SIX WEEKS AGO. She experienced a mystical revelation at a shrine in Qom and then six weeks later broadcast her conversion to the entire world.

Read More »

THE ENTRY “Do I Believe What I Believe?” is now very long and includes a number of interesting side issues such as whether pronouns used in reference to God should be capitalized. But the main question was:  Do I believe? And the answer is, yes. I believe because it is reasonable to believe.

Here is an apt quote, sent by reader James H., from Hilaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies:

        The last category of fruits by which we may judge the character of the Modern Attack consists in the fruit it bears in the field of the intelligence, what it does to human reason. 

        When the Modern Attack was gathering, a couple of lifetimes ago, while it was still confined to a small number of academic men, the first assault upon reason began. It seemed to make but little progress outside a restricted circle.  The plain man and his common-sense (which are the strongholds of reason) were not affected. Today they are.  Read More »

THIS ARTICLE about how the new health care law will deny tax breaks for breast pumps is typical of the sort of public controversies that come with nationalized medicine. This mind-numbing distraction and pettiness will become routine. When Obama  ran for election, he spoke about the need for every woman to get free mammograms. Imagine George Washington talking about a medical procedure, particularly a diagnostic medical procedure, as if it were a pressing national concern. Socialism drags down the entire mental life of a nation.

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Everything means something, the Good Lovelies and the Viswijfenkoor not being excepted. For what it’s worth, I concur with Laura that the Good Lovelies put me off; the little-girl, sleepover antics and the false lesbianism are inconsistent with my sense of adult femininity. The Dutch ladies of the Viswijfenkoor play at nothing, make no attempt to doll themselves up, but sing lustily and are unmistakably female. In these traits they strike me as more feminine, actually, than the trio of teasing come-on girls. Laura mentioned the four girls of Kraja, the Swedish folk-group. They are in their late teens and early twenties, but their presentation is not “girlish” in any pejorative sense; they maintain a happy (sometimes a solemn) dignity (depending on the song) that requires no antics. They have enormous natural charm, an essential component of which is an unstudied modesty. I very much liked the Quebe Sisters. Playing the fiddle signifies plenty of discipline over the years, and their choice of repertory is refreshingly non-contemporary. The last fact suggests their healthy independence from “youth culture.” Does anyone remember the Elvis film, Viva Las Fishwives?

Read More »

JOSH F. writes:

I believe it to be a dangerous illusion to view Muslim women as  oppressed. After all, good, devout Muslim women are mothers of devout  jihadists. In fact, when one really absorbs the head-to-toe covering  of a devout Muslim woman, it is hard not to see the uniform of a  warrior. The amorphous, ambiguous, unpredictable essence of the  “dress” gives indication of intelligent life, but that’s it. I was at  Sea World when I first observed this military garb. It was futuristic and Star Wars-like. The movement underneath seemed gateless, travelled without effort then stood motionless. Repeat. A small perfectly  retangular “slit” for vision and eyes hidden in shade. I didn’t see  oppression. I saw assertion.

A READER writes:

I appreciated your brief thoughts in reaction to the United Nations’ report on the global lot of women.  The subject it raises is one that always causes me to wonder just how clearly we in the West see reality when we choose to analyze societies in points East, especially when these analyses delve into relationships between the sexes.  The assertion that seems to always surface is that women are oppressed, and men are their oppressors.  Rather, even more than asserted, it is assumed and taken for granted that this is the defining characteristic of life for a woman who lives in eastern, especially Islamic, societies.  The woman is bound and chained, a prisoner in her own society, and it is unthinkable that she could be happy.  After all, she is not even allowed to drive a car!      Read More »

A WOMAN almost never does something that will bring about social annihilation for herself or her family. Men are more influential in shaping society through idea. Women are more influential in shaping it through form. Mark Richardson at Oz Conservative considers the case of Lauren Booth, the sister-in-law of Tony Blair who recently converted to Islam. My guess is that she sought to embrace God in a socially acceptable form. She might have lost more friends if she had become a pious Christian than a pious Muslim. She did not risk social annihilation, not in the self-annihilating, anti-Christian Europe of today. More Western women will probably follow in her footsteps. Read More »

FRED OWENS writes:

The Good Lovelies are a trio of young women who graduated from my college — St. Michael’s College at the University of Toronto. It was a wonderful, joyful Catholic community when I attended in the 1960s. And when I see these sweet young women and hear their voices raised in harmony, I remember the good girls I dated back when I was young. Read More »

THE SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES between male and female voters are apparent in this recent poll of Pennsylvanians.  Pat Toomey, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, leads among male voters by 54 to 40 percent and has a statistically insignificant lead overall. U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak, his Democratic opponent, is preferred by 53 to 42 percent of women voters.

DID YOU ever in your wildest dreams imagine the day when the foremost international organization was monitoring housework around the world? That day has arrived. The United Nations considers your laundry its business. It must make sure men are doing enough.

The United Nations is the world’s most powerful and highly-funded promoter of animosity and division between the sexes, stoking this ill-feeling with an unending profusion of reports and a blizzard of misleading statistics. Every sign of difference in any culture around the world is a sign of the active campaign by men against women. The global lot of women is dire. But it is not life itself that makes things hard, it is men: men who rape and kill and keep women from going to school, men who refuse to let women have their own businesses and men who do not provide women with enough counseling. The United Nations are united against men.