THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU at The Brussels Journal writes again on the French thinker René Girard’s conception of the isolated ego of modernity. Girard’s ideas help explain the fever pitch of high-tech connectedness and consumerism. Dr. Bertonneau writes:

The entire modern scheme of “getting and spending” depends on the industrial manipulation of what Girard calls internal mediation. All “consumers” are nowadays Emma Bovary or Dostoyevsky’s “Underground Man.”

Cell phones and basketball shoes exemplify the mimetic trend. Both items have occasioned violence all the way to homicide, basketball shoes most conspicuously, but also cell phones. Given the intensity of advertising for these two commodities, such violence must surprise no one. It is the same violence, moreover, that arose from Cain’s jealousy when God’s admiration for Brother Abel’s animal offering appeared, from Cain’s perspective, to have made Abel the monopolist of charisma. Who can bear to stand next to the monopolist of charisma? The cell phone differs from the pair of basketball shoes only in being itself a medium of mediation, responding constantly to the user’s worry about what to desire, and inundating her with seductive images and verbal provocations thereto.

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KARL D. writes:

There is something new in the language today. It is the response of “No worries” to a “Thank you” instead of the traditional “You’re welcome.” I don’t know why, but I find this highly annoying. I could even get behind the casual “No problem” in some circumstances because at least it insinuates that a “Thank you” was unnecessary as the service provided did not even warrant one. It’s almost akin to saying, “My Pleasure.” Yet “No Worries” implies to me that I was “worried” about the situation or the service provided. It’s almost like saying, “I forgive you.” Why would I be worried or need forgiveness? I am far from an English teacher or professor, but that’s my take on it.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

The Washington Post epitomizes what is so utterly reprehensible of many major dailies in their coverage of news events. For example, recently this other “paper of record”  held an orgy of sycophantic coverage of the death of former Mayor Marion Barry, “Washington’s Mayor for life.” The fact that this very flawed man, caught on tape smoking crack cocaine, who went to prison for six months, and was a persistent tax evader who should have been in prison once again, is now the focus of The Post’s unbridled adulation, tells you something about this daily. But if The Post’s quotidian reporting is awful, then their reporting of its Style Section is egregious. Case in point: the National Museum of Women in the Arts (how many know that such an entity exists?) exhibit of “Picturing Mary, the Madonna as Woman, Mother and Idea.”

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  STEVE H. writes: You must watch this brief video showing a virtual flash mob coming together. The catch is that it is the United States Air Force Band at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. They [play Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" and] sing "Joy To The World." It brought tears to my eyes.

THE University of Virginia gang rape story published by Rolling Stone has proved to be, if not a hoax, so suspicious that even the Washington Post and the New York Times have taken notice and a public apology of sorts was issued by the junky journal. However, the story fit so well into the script of privileged, white villains and innocent, deflowered maidens (characters who do exist in real life but whose numbers are exaggerated for political purposes) that we can still treat it as true.

The Times says the story, exaggerated as it is, is still basically true.

Whatever happened or did not happen to Jackie, campus sexual violence remains all too real, and false reports are rare.

Karen Straughan writes by e-mail:

The UVA circus will end as it always does—once all the dust has settled, the school will release a statement saying the incident was a hoax, it will reaffirm its commitment to keep [female] students safe from sexual assault, and will enact more mandatory “consent training” for male students, and more regulations and procedures that allay the panic people feel when they ask themselves, “Okay, but what if it HAD happened? What if it WAS real?”

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SHEFALI writes from India:

A friend put up a picture of Venus and Serena Williams in sarees on Facebook. Poor woman, seemingly unaware of the PC police she commented how brawny and ugly they looked in the garment, far from feminine. A torrent of abuses was hurled at her from all quarters, from equating beauty with skin colour to bringing down women of colour. She even got blocked from Facebook temporarily because of complaints.

My friend told me tearfully that her criticism was not targeted at skin colour or external beauty but womanly grace and femininity that made these two steroid sisters stick our like sore thumbs in the sari. As women are becoming masculine, lack of refined femininity is something we are expected to ignore and criminal to observe.

Since when did it become okay for women to look like eunuchs?

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  AN entrepreneur hopes to produce and market this elegant bedding. If you pledge $75 to her project, you will receive a Cheese and Pepperoni Duvet cover and two standard crust pillows. It is not for me, dear reader, to tell you that there may be better ways to spend your precious resources.

  WILLIAM KIRKPATRICK has an interesting piece at Crisis magazine about G.K. Chesterton's 1914 novel The Flying Inn and its depiction of an Islamicized England. Kirkpatrick writes: Chesterton’s prophetic novel hits uncomfortably close to home. One thing he didn’t anticipate, however, is that the final Islamization of England could be accomplished without importing a foreign army. Since modern England has already imported enough Muslim immigrants to engineer a significant cultural shift, an occupying army won’t be needed. Otherwise, Chesterton was right on target. He foresaw that an Islamic takeover would be facilitated by cultural elites eager to show their tolerance for new ideas and fashions and their corresponding disdain for traditional culture. In Chesterton’s day, the cultural elites were referred to as the smart set; today they are the multicultural and media elites. And, as in Chesterton’s story, they are quite willing to believe that Muslims discovered or invented just about everything under the sun.

PAUL T. writes:

The most scathing article I’ve run across on the case of Wyatt (“Nicole”) Maines is by (I presume) a homosexual, writing from a non-Christian perspective; even so, the author makes some strong points and raises some unpleasant facts we’re not too likely to hear amid all the triumphalist hoopla over this case.

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    ST. BARBARA, whose feast is observed today, was just another weak, mindless woman before the Age of Feminism. Her story is partly based on legend and on many hundreds of years of veneration: Barbara was the daughter of a rich heathen named Dioscorus. She was carefully guarded by her father who kept her shut up in a tower in order to preserve her from the outside world. An offer of marriage which was received through him she rejected. Before going on a journey her father commanded that a bath-house be erected for her use near her dwelling, and during his absence Barbara had three windows put in it, as a symbol of the Holy Trinity, instead of the two originally intended. When her father returned she acknowledged herself to be a Christian; upon this she was ill-treated by him and dragged before the prefect of the province, Martinianus, who had her cruelly tortured and finally condemned her to death by beheading. The father himself carried out the death-sentence, but in punishment for this he was struck by lightning on the way home and his body consumed. Another Christian named Juliana suffered the death of a martyr along with Barbara. A pious man called Valentinus buried the bodies of the saints; at this grave the sick were healed and the pilgrims who came to pray received aid and consolation. The emperor in whose reign the martyrdom is placed is sometimes…

    THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes: As a side issue, not entirely related to the discussion of the age of the earth, this is the funniest critique of scientism that I know.

THERE is no scientific proof that the earth is billions of years old despite the almost universal popular assumption, after years of evolutionary propaganda, that the issue is settled once and for all. There is evidence supporting both a very long span of time and strong evidence against it. As Don Batten writes at Creation.com:

No scientific method can prove the age of the earth and the universe …. Although age indicators are called ‘clocks’ they aren’t, because all ages result from calculations that necessarily involve making assumptions about the past. Always the starting time of the ‘clock’ has to be assumed as well as the way in which the speed of the clock has varied over time. Further, it has to be assumed that the clock was never disturbed.

There is no independent natural clock against which those assumptions can be tested. For example, the amount of cratering on the moon, based on currently observed cratering rates, would suggest that the moon is quite old. However, to draw this conclusion we have to assume that the rate of cratering has been the same in the past as it is now. And there are now good reasons for thinking that it might have been quite intense in the past, in which case the craters do not indicate an old age at all (see below).

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  SEE the report at DailyKenn.

  WHILE the recent story of gang rape years ago at a University of Virginia fraternity prompted national alarm despite a lack of formal charges or criminal evidence, there is relative silence, and virtually no feminist hysteria, in response to criminal charges of gang rape at William Paterson University in New Jersey last week. I wonder why. Just wait and see how little attention this story receives from the press. It offers zero opportunity for leftist political agitators, given that the men charged are black. If it is true, and it may of course not be true, I feel deeply sorry for the victim, not only because of the horror she experienced but because she will face a packed courtroom of the friends and relatives of the students charged who are all saying it couldn't possibly be true. If she is white, which I suspect she is, she will likely face even more intense hostility. The thousands of women who have been brutally raped and murdered by black men do not qualify as victims to the quasi-religious feminist cult of female victimhood. That's because this cult is ultimately about power, not real sympathy for women.

THE denial of sex differences, combined with a legal view that defines freedom as the opportunity to destroy oneself freely and freakishly, has once again produced bizarre results. Wyatt “Nicole” Maines, now in high school in Portland, Maine, that bastion of New England “gender” Puritanism, has been awarded $75,000 in a lawsuit against the school district because while in elementary school he was asked to use a unisex bathroom instead of the girls room. Maines has secured an important right at public expense: forgive the crudeness, the right for a boy to pee in the girls restroom. Down with discrimination! Only equality, nothing more and nothing less! Onward, Comrades!!

The ruling portends further mayhem in government schools around the country. Imagine the task of sorting the boys who claim to be girls from the boys who just want to go into the girls room. That’s exactly what happened in the elementary school Maines attended. Onward, Comrades!! 

The Portland Press Herald, which plays along in its reporting with the whole emperor-has-no-clothes political theater that says Maines from Maine, irreversibly male from birth, is now a girl, reports on the award:

Maines, now a 17-year-old high school senior in Portland, was a fifth-grader at Asa Adams School in Orono in 2007 when the guardian of another student objected to her use of a communal girls’ bathroom. Administrators intervened, telling Nicole to use a separate, unisex faculty bathroom.

Nicole Maines – born Wyatt Maines – had identified as a girl since as early as age 2. School officials became aware of her gender identification when she was in the third grade, when students and teachers began referring to Nicole as “she.” (more…)

TOM writes:

Check out Geert Wilders’ speech, posted at Galliawatch, along with news about popular uprisings in France.

Keep your eyes on France. Pope St. Pius VI prophesied after the French Revolution that France would lead the way back in the restoration of Christendom.

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ONE month after the gruesome discovery on an abandoned rural property of the body of 18-year-old Hannah Graham, the University of Virginia sophomore allegedly kidnapped and murdered by Jesse Matthews, a black non-student who had been kicked out of two colleges for rape allegations and had almost certainly also raped and murdered a Virginia Tech student, the UVA campus has been recently whipped up into a state of hysteria by an article, published in The Rolling Stone, describing the gang rape of a freshmen, identified only as “Jackie,” at a fraternity house.

Forgive me for not posting a link to the Rolling Stone piece. If you want to read it, you can easily find it online. It is trash journalism at its finest, a piece of political propaganda and soft porn. On both counts, it has gotten a lot of attention.

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