HERE is a thesis that I cannot prove at this time, but I believe to be true:

Never in history have children of comfort and wealth experienced more physical isolation as a rule than do American children who live in large suburban mansions. In previous times, those who lived in mansions had servants. Their houses were generally filled with activity and people at all times. American individualism and egalitarianism abhor the hierarchical arrangements involved in domestic servitude though they do condone nannies and babysitters, who generally replace others rather than adding to the number of people in the home at any one time. In much of European history, ordinary people, even farmers, favored clustered villages, not individual houses on large tracts. It’s an anomaly that is opposed to the social nature of children, a subject to which the feminist woman is entirely indifferent, believing as she does that she should further the isolation of children by not even being home.

I thought of it this after reading about the very sad case of a Pennsylvania 13-year-old who left his family’s mansion, surrounded by their 13 acres, on an evening last week and committed suicide on the border of the property. Was he alone at the time? Would he have done the same thing if he had passed others on his way out the door? Would an encounter with even one other person who knew him have broken the spell of his self-absorption? (more…)

MANY Americans are familiar with the famous Supreme Court 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education, in which the federal court declared that state laws allowing separate schools for black and white children were unconstitutional.

Less known, indeed almost unknown, is the case of Stell v. Savannah Board of Education which was heard in U.S. District Court in Georgia in 1963. The Savannah Board of Education challenged desegregation of its schools and the federal district court ruled in its favor after exhaustive examination of the scientific evidence of racial differences in learning, a process which was never conducted in Brown v. Board of Education. Stell was entirely ignored by the national media, which is one reason why you won’t even find a Wikipedia entry on it today.

In his book Race and Reality, another forgotten and largely ignored cry in the dark against the terrible hubris behind racial egalitarianism, Carleton Putnam, the Princeton-educated lawyer and businessman who took this subject on, described the court’s findings, which were eventually overturned on appeal. (The Supreme Court refused to hear it.)  The Georgia federal court ruled that desegregation would be harmful for both blacks and whites. I believe the court’s findings have been abundantly vindicated, particularly by the chaos that now reigns in black schools, where blacks are forced to learn according to expectations better suited to white schools, and by the legal forms of segregation that have been pursued by whites, who generally relocate or enroll their children in private schools in order to avoid the results of integration all the while duplicitously (or ignorantly) championing full equality without difference in the mistaken belief that this charade is better for blacks. O, white man, you are so dishonest. You are up to your neck in the mud of your own lies. (more…)

KARL D. writes:

I am sure by now you have heard the story of the Oklahoma University frat boys who were filmed singing a racist song on a bus during a trip. It has now reached its logical conclusion in what is today’s race-religious America. The witches have been selected and are being set up to burn in sacrifice to our new religion. (more…)

IN an article about Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, the longtime president of Notre Dame University who died recently, Thomas Droleskey writes about the “incalculable devastation” at Catholic colleges and universities since Vatican II:

Many are the horror stories of faithful Catholic faculty members who have been hounded and harassed for their orthodoxy while teaching in formerly Catholic universities. Naturally, the harassment has come from the very people who claim that they are open-minded and receptive to all people. College administrators at these institutions of apostasy have either looked the other way or have actively participated in this harassment, preferring to be viewed as sophisticated professionals in the eyes of their peers at secular and/or state-run institutions of higher learning. (more…)

BUCK writes:

As I was reading your entry, Dear G.I. Jane, about women in combat roles, I happened to be watching Blue Bloods, a TV show about a three-generation family of cops and prosecuters and a police commissioner in New York City. The youngest grandson is a uniform officer who has a very attractive female partner, Officer Eddie Janco, played by Vanessa Ray (above). Officer Janco is raped by a guy who picks her up at a bar. He forces his way into her apartment, beats and rapes her. She is completely defenseless against him. He has no weapon and he isn’t much bigger than she is. (more…)

A GERMAN STUDENT writes:

I am a young, thankful reader from Germany. Visiting your site daily keeps me sane.

I have to apologize for my English, which may show errors. In school they taught us English only with prepared texts about politically-correct themes, such as life in India or Martin Luther King.

I want to comment on your post “Ancient Abbey in Bavaria Transformed.” I live near Munich, Bavaria and at the moment, refugees – or other Muslims –  are flooding Europe, especially Germany, due to the southern European countries letting them pass through till they get caught by the Border Police at the German border. (more…)

Here is a long analysis of pizza and politics by Bloomberg Business. Thanks to friendly politicians and bureaucrats, frozen pizza is still classified as a vegetable for the purposes of school lunches. This is sort of like classifying asphalt and tire treads as a green salad.

The Pizza Industrial Complex gives most of its lobbying funds to the Republican Party. This is no surprise. The party of business-at-any-cost is more sympathetic to purveyors of culinary crud.

Please don’t blame me for these brutally honest dispatches from the Land of Pizza. I am only the messenger. (more…)

CAROLINE writes from upstate New York: I spent part of my childhood in Germany, and my parents insisted on visiting old castles and churches.  Now I remember this time fondly, and of course, at the time, didn’t have any inkling of the bizarre Kafkaesque times I would live to see, with abbeys now being used to house Muslim "refugees." The Muslim Brotherhood document captured by the Feds in 1994 (I think) has it right: we will bring down western civilization by their own hands (paraphrase and my italics). In a way also, this is what the contraceptive mentality hath wrought.

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Here is a story that is linked, in its own bizarre way, to The Thinking Housewife′s ongoing series about the myriad oddities of women in the military.

U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning (the story refers to him incorrectly as a  Private First Class; at his conviction Manning was reduced in grade back to Private) may have lost at his court-martial for releasing classified information, but he has just won a victory from the U.S. Army Court of Criminal Appeals. (more…)

VANDERBILT Professor Virginia Abernethy, a former vice presidential candidate for the American Freedom Party, is interviewed in this video. More here.

This is a very interesting interview.

Abernethy makes the point that mass immigration has caused a plummeting birthrate. It is more likely that mass immigration was the result of declining fertility. Would Americans have tolerated  the sudden invasion of foreign workers if they had had larger families and had not approved the ready availability of contraception? (more…)

ALAN writes:

With regard to the Big Lie that being “unarmed” makes a giant black man a dear, sweet, gentle, agreeable fellow, consider the following:

Ernest Blackwell, 29, wanted to become a professional football player.  He was black, 6’3”, 235 pounds.  Early one evening in August 2004, he embarked on a rampage that would cost him his life, a rampage wholly unprovoked by anything or anyone.  This took place in North St. Louis County, a few miles east of Ferguson. (more…)

THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD characters on ABC Family’s show The Fosters kissed Monday night. (more…)

THE extraordinarily high number of American children with parents in prison is explored in this review of a new book on the subject. (more…)

THE late Elizabeth Wright wrote in 1993 of how black intellectuals undermined pride in manual and non-professional labor: (more…)

IF THIS 2012 post by the reader Alan doesn’t make you mothers shed a few tears on this winter day then you are colder than a glacier.

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TWO YEARS AGO, on the occasion of Pentagon approval of women in combat roles, a writer at Family Security Matters wrote about the “elephant in the room:”

Oh, by the way – you and your girlfriends do plan on registering for the draft on your eighteenth birthday, don’t you – just as your male peers do? If you insist upon the privileges associated with military service, you have to assume the risks, too. So, get yourself down to the post office and register – and be quick about it. Up to now, you and your feminist pals have been skimming the cream off the top – demanding the best billets for yourselves (fighter pilot, submariner, etc.) but often bailing out when an inconvenient deployment or a war came along. Pregnancy and “female issues” certainly make handy excuses, don’t they? Well, that won’t fly anymore. Don’t feel like deploying or going to war? Too bad; you’ll go anyway – just like the men do when they are called up. Welcome to the war, baby! (more…)

PETE F. writes:

Regarding your feature, “Girl Soldier,” on women in the U.S. Army Ranger program – where does one begin? Not so many years ago, such a tragicomic effort as trying to make Army Rangers out of women would have been the stuff of satire, but present-day reality has grown so strange that effective satire is now rather a difficult undertaking.

When I was a boy back in the 1960s and early 1970s, the suggestion that women belonged in the infantry – let alone an elite unit like the Ranger regiment – would have been seen as something so ludicrous that only a child (or a comic fishing for laughs) could suggest it. Today, that world has been turned upside down and those who believe that women do not belong everywhere in the military are the ones seen as lunatics. As a society, we have well-and-truly stepped through the looking glass.

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