DID you know that two slices of pizza, plus a large drink of carbonated chemicals, costs almost ten dollars at many pizzerias? Perhaps you might consider giving up the dollar value of one or two of these life-sustaining lunches to support this blog. I realize that profound discussions on the rotting moral edifice of Western society are not comparable to slices of particleboard slathered with tomato-vinyl compound and molten mozzarella spackling, but please consider sacrificing the one to support the other. Then the next time you feel you are surrounded by lies and a civilizational crisis so big many people don’t even see it, at least you will know you have done something.

By the way, a reader has informed me that he sometimes gets banner ads at the top of this page. This is some kind of bug. These ads are not put there by me. If you have seen the same thing, please let me know so I can get an idea of how extensive the problem is.

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  PRINCE GEORGES County, the mostly-black suburb of Washington, D.C., has the highest residential foreclosure rate in the region. Michael Fletcher of The Washington Post performs mental cartwheels trying to explain why this is so, and why the county is generally lagging, without looking at the obvious, which is that blacks in large numbers cannot sustain the high-functioning stability typical of expensive white suburbs. The expectation that they can has led to financial devastation for some. Racial egalitarianism causes suffering. It also does not alleviate the anger it is expected to address.

WARNING: The following video clip from the 1946 movie The Captive Heart, a film about a British prisoner of war in a German World War II camp who pretends to be another, deceased soldier in order to save his own life and falls in love with the dead man’s wife after writing letters to her in the name of her husband, contains scenes that may incite lust for normality.  The men and women are highly masculine and highly feminine, respectively. There is no crudity. There are no women soldiers. There are no bedroom scenes. There is a shocking scene of small town life in Britain with children actually playing outside. The whole thing is shocking by today’s standards.

Watch with caution. GRAPHIC SCENES OF TENDER AFFECTION AND LOYALTY. I offer it to you for historical purposes only.

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MY HUSBAND and I were in the airport this week to fly to Florida. We were traveling there to help a relative who can’t walk much or drive anymore move north. (We packed up her car in a few hours and drove home, covering about 1,200 miles in two days, not counting the time in the air.) While we were at the boarding gate, an interview with the hideously wasted Bill Cosby appeared on the obligatory screen in the waiting area. There was a day when you could wait for a plane without being force-fed interviews with celebrities accused of drunken rape. Not anymore. After Cosby, as if to counter his bloated decrepitude, that extremely fit Indian doctor who is always advising people on how to beat the stress of life provided health tips and then there was a commercial for the dynamic and beautiful Christiane Amanpour and her stagey, mind-blowingly superficial interviews of world figures.

Everywhere one goes, it’s there. In restaurants, airports, doctors offices and hotel lobbies. You even encounter it at the gas pump. The big screen. The elated announcers. The look-a-like blondes, the nice boys, the virtuous black men, the super smart Asian women — they are your companions and advisers. Remember Muzak? This is Newzak Nation, where “news” is broadcast in public places 24 hours a day. What is 365 times 24?  You have to hear them. The entire nation is suckled at the engorged boobs of Newz, which makes the Soviet propaganda machine seem like the work of mind-control amateurs.  (more…)

  THANK YOU to readers who have generously donated. However, I still have a long way to go with my fundraising campaign. Unfortunately (or fortunately), if I don't reach my modest goal by February 7th, this blog will become a subscription e-mail magazine. I will explain how this will work later. The nice thing about a magazine is that it would allow for longer pieces about the issues discussed here. Anyone who donates will receive some number of editions of this magazine, which I hope will include commentary by regular contributors here, whom readers have come to know and appreciate. Please donate today if you'd like to help prevent this change -- or let me know if you want to donate but actually prefer the idea of a magazine format. Thank you again for your support. [thermometer width=70 align=center]

    DON VINCENZO writes: I was at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Never in all my years have I seen such a multitude gathered for any one event as I did yesterday. I'd bet the numbers come to more than a half-million. Do any good? The GOP pulled the "no abortions after 20 week gestation" bill Thursday because they didn't have the votes despite their super majority, and those "no" votes included at least two Tea Party women. The bill it pushed through the House yesterday would block federal financing of abortion. It is a rethread of current federal law. It took little or no courage at all by the GOP and has little chance of success. I increasingly have reached the conclusion that the Romans did long ago: Nolite confidere in principibus - place not your trust in princes, and I can add politicians, too.

MRS. T. writes:

Your recent posts on large families and rabbit breeding have really hit home for me.

I am the second oldest of nine children from a Catholic family. Growing up, I constantly heard how my parents “bred like rabbits.” I would usually reply something along the lines of, “Nine times in x amount of years isn’t a lot.” Can you imagine a 12-year-old girl having to defend her parent’s intimacies, their God-given marital rights?? How vastly inappropriate. I grew up predominately in the 90s so I suppose this mentality should be of no surprise. (more…)

HERE are pictures from before Vatican II Revolution and its overhauling of the highest form of worship, the Catholic Mass, which has its roots in Jewish ceremony and pagan sacrifice and from which 70 percent of the ancient prayers, many of which dated from the earliest days and centuries of the Church, were removed. Below is a video of the recent "Mega Mass" in the Phillipines.

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BY WHAT principle can supporters of “marriage equality” deny the right for a father to marry his son? A blogger who was raised by a lesbian asks this question.

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MARY writes:

Lately it seems more than ever I hear the canard that religion causes war and when religion is finally gone we will achieve “world peace.” Those who believe this claim fail to recognize that simple truth that man is hard-wired for worship; absent the true God in his life man will always orient those energies toward something else: the state, secularism, power, money. Gathering up this refocused energy – often unwittingly provided by weak, non-religious liberals – the greatest evil gains its power. Look no farther than Stalin to see how much justice and peace the absence of religion generates.

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  "Birth control leads to two things — no births and no control."    ---- G.K. Chesterton

  ACCORDING to Voice of America, those who know a bit about the private lives of rabbits are none too pleased with "Pope" Francis's recent remarks suggesting rabbits are irresponsible parents. Apparently rabbits are more restrained than is commonly believed. In captivity at least, they definitely do not observe God's injunction to "be fruitful and multiply:" Speaking Tuesday with Deutsche Presse Agentur, Erwin Leowsky, president of the central council of the Association of German Rabbit Breeders, took issue with pope’s analogy, saying that only rabbits that live in the wild are sexually overactive. He said those in captivity have tamer reproductive habits. Leowsky also said he thought Francis should skip the misleading cliches about rabbits and allow Catholics to use contraceptives. It occurs to me that rabbits in captivity may have a lot in common with human beings in captivity. Captivity, that is, to lies. Lies about life, about the human soul, about immortality (or the lack of it) and about what God wants from us. Anyway, rabbits don't get into any of that. They really don't have many "issues." Read more on Rabbits vs. Catholics here.

  CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS, who unfortunately calls herself a feminist, addresses a couple of the major myths surrounding sexual assault on campus.

  NANCY writes: Just last night, before reading your request this morning, I decided that I should send you a donation. So, this is not really a response to your post, but a sincere gift of gratitude for all you do. Honestly, I don't know what I'd do without you. I click onto your site many times a day to see if there is anything new to read and ponder. You keep me sane. [thermometer width=70 align=center]

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Your post about the Canadian lady MP who serially misses votes in the Commons, citing maternal obligations as an excuse, caught my eye.  Canada is emphatically not some northern America that differs only in still having the Queen.  Canada is quite different from the United States, and Canadians – who don’t always love their messy superpower neighbour to the south – are at pains to keep it that way.  When Canada beat the United States in overtime to win the 2010 Olympic hockey gold medal, the national rejoicing was as much over whom the “patriot sons” had beaten as the fact they were champions.  The curious case of Sana Hassainia exemplifies the problems of over-diverse Canada, and by extension the West overall, in microcosm.

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JOHANN SEBASTIEN BACH bred like a rabbit. He may have been a musical genius, but when it came to procreation, he was on the level of a four-footed lagomorph. Bach fathered a total of 20 children, with the first born when he was 23 and the last by his second wife when he was 57.

I expect someone is now going to write to me and say that contraceptive methods were not available in the 18th century, which is not true, or that people had many more children back then because infant mortality was high, suggesting that Bach and his two wives did not really want that many children, they were just hedging their bets. If that’s the case, they really went too far. Ten of Bach’s 20 children survived into full-grown rabbit hood. While that’s quite a high mortality rate by today’s standards, that’s still a heck of a lot of rabbits by today’s standards. By the way, whether the Bachs wanted their children or not is irrelevant. They had them. They gave them life. It possibly never occurred to them to wonder how many they wanted.

It is often said of parents of former times that they only had large families because they were seeking help to till the fields or because infant mortality was high and contraception unavailable. Supposedly they were selfish and only had children for utilitarian reasons or were uncontrollable rabbits. While today’s enlightened parents have fewer children but want them for the right reasons.

These are easy accusations. Those maligned and misrepresented parents cannot speak up for themselves. Nevertheless, whatever they wanted or didn’t want, they did a much better job of affirming life and providing for future generations, who were the beneficiaries of their fertility.

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  MATTHEW S. writes: What a beautiful testimony from Pope Pius XII to the joys of a large family, written in the year that my parents welcomed me, their fifth child. Sadly I drank the Professional Success Kool Aid, delaying parenthood and therefore restricting myself to three children (for whom I daily thank God, grateful for the joy they have brought me). Everything the Holy Father says about the particular kinds of happiness experienced in large families is indisputably true. Some would say that my parents, who eventually had six children, "bred like rabbits." But I would ask the current "pope:" Which of the six of us is superfluous?