T.D. writes:

It pains me to say it, but I read the recent thread on the radical military as an evil institution with nodding approval. I was pained because I spent 12 years in the U.S. military.  I enlisted shortly before 9/11 and I was commissioned a few years later.  I left for several reasons, one of them being that I no longer believed we were the “good guys.” I came to understand that we were the servants of a corrupt, ruthless ruling class that was completely beholden to the false religion of radical egalitarianism, and committed to the creation of a global overclass to force this ideology on every corner of the world. (more…)

  HAPPY NEW YEAR! May the year ahead bring you many blessings. Here is the Vienna Philharmonic in 2011 performing its annual version of Johann Strauss Sr.'s Radetzky March.

  AT Reclaiming Beauty, Kidist Paulos Asrat describes an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York about the 19th-century gilded age in New York. She writes, "What caught my attention was the confidence with which these New Yorkers 'wore' their wealth." Miss Asrat exaggerates somewhat the religious awareness of these elites. I believe it is more accurate to say they unconsciously assumed the attitudes of European aristocrats but lacked the enduring social order or religious foundation that would allow these attitudes to survive. They inherited a hierarchical sensibility that was soon to be leveled by egalitarianism. Wealthy New Yorkers now wear denim and black leather. The eye can still detect their wealth of course. It is visible in their toned figures, their expensive haircuts and shoes, but it is never ornate.

  THE Russian conductor Valery Gergiev is being persecuted and threatened with the loss of contracts not because he has said anything offensive about homosexuals or because he has ever been found to discriminate against them, but because he has not become a homosexual activist. He has not used his position in the musical world to campaign against Russia's laws banning homosexualist propaganda. Thus we see the utter foolishness of those who believe that the advancing of the homosexualist agenda in America will lead to less anger and revolutionary fervor. On the contrary, the more that agenda is approved, the higher the bar is raised. It is not enough to demand that everyone tolerate homosexuality. Every person must be a homosexualist revolutionary.

  A white couple was walking on the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville late at night on December 20th when the man tripped. As he was on the ground, three black males approached and beat him until he was unconscious and then also beat his girlfriend. The men laughed and high-fived each other during the attack. Though the couple had photos of the assault, the police did not release them to the public. A Charlottesville newspaper closed its comments section linked to an article about the attack after being overwhelmed by commentary.

BILL McMORRIS, at The Federalist, discusses a subject that has been explored here before: the loss of all-male social clubs and its effects on male friendship. He writes:

ALEX writes:

This will not be well received but it needs to be said. As a manifestation of the fundamental transformation of America in general that is being completed before our eyes, the feminization of the U.S. military is of course sad. However, patriotic Americans who are honest with themselves must admit the tragic reality: their beloved United States and its military are now fully and unreservedly the greatest force for evil in the world, wreaking havoc everywhere that there is a chance to overthrow a moderate regime and install a democratically elected Islamist government, which will promptly align itself with the most radical Muslim scum, exterminate the country’s Christians and ship hordes of “refugees” to the West. (more…)

  ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes: It's simply impossible to do business on any kind of scale in Asia without engaging in corrupt business practices. And this mentality then seeps back into the West; I'm thoroughly convinced that the sharp business practices which led to the housing bubble are directly attributable to the kinds of shenanigans which routinely take place in Latin America and Asia.

  DON'T put away your Christmas music, dear reader. This is Christmastide and the joy of the season is still at its peak. Here is Josh Groban's "What Child is This?"

PETE writes:

Regarding “More Fudging of Military Standards for Women,” the news story notes, “Starting Jan. 1, every woman in the Marines Corps (sic) was supposed to meet a new physical standard by performing three pull-ups,” but later goes on to state “Lance Cpl. Ally Beiswanger explained that the pullup test had been put off until sometime next year, to gather more data and ensure all female Marines are given the best opportunity to succeed.’”

It is important to note that the armed forces have never held women to the same standards of physical performance as men; the services falsely claim to have done so – but that intellectual sleight of hand is only possible via what the army and other services call “gender norming.” What is gender-norming, you ask? The answer, stripped of Pentagon obfuscation and jargon, is simple: it is a handicapping system for military women, designed to bring their largely-inferior physical performance into alignment with that of men. (more…)

AT Galliawatch, Tiberge recently posted the extraordinary statement of Henri, Comte de Paris, from the Orléans line of the Bourbon dynasty, in response to a report on integration, which recommends, among other things, that Arabic be taught in French schools and that immigrants not be expected to give up their cultural identity. The Count wrote:

Is it necessary to recall what everybody knows: the extraordinary prophecies of George Orwell? It is true that it will always have been easier and more exciting to destroy a world rich from its culture, its efforts, and to erase forever the memory of the original roots of the people, whoever they may be. All of this on the pretext of providing a false new joie de vivre for future slaves, forced to choose between submission to the dictatorship of political correctness and absolute exclusion. (more…)

  MOST people, including most Catholics, end up in hell. St. Leonard of Port Maurice spoke on this "terrible mystery" in the 18th century.

FROM NPR:

Starting Jan. 1, every woman in the Marines Corps (sic) was supposed to meet a new physical standard by performing three pullups. But that has been put off.

The Marine Corps announced it quietly. There was no news conference — just a notice on its social media sites and an item on its own TV show, The Corps Report. (more…)

  From The Wilton Diptych.

WHEN I think of the many children, mostly boys, who are spending these post-Christmas days almost entirely inside with electronic games, I am reminded of a comment a Polish artist friend of mine once made. My son, who was about 13 at the time, was visiting his son and they were playing some kind of computer game. The father sat down for a minute and observed them. Then he said to my son, in his heavy accent, “If I had spent my days doing this for hours when I was a boy, I would have shot myself.”

Destroy the imagination of children and human beings become the most pliable of creatures. And that’s what spending a childhood with electronic games does. It destroys the imagination. It replaces silence and constructive boredom and annoying social interaction with ceaseless noise and novelty. Children today live in what the writer Anthony Esolen calls the “Kingdom of Noise.”

(more…)

FROM The New York Post:

An Iowa State University professor resigned after admitting he falsely claimed rabbit blood could be turned into a vaccine for the AIDS virus.

Dr. Dong-Pyou Han spiked a clinical test sample with healthy human blood to make it appear that the rabbit serum produced disease-fighting antibodies, officials said. (more…)

JOHN DEMPSEY writes: