ALAN writes:

I agree with your recent remarks and those of Anthony Esolen regarding “destroying the imagination” with modern toys and games. They prompted these thoughts:

On ordinary evenings in 1952-’54, my grandmother held me on her lap as she enjoyed the weekly half-hour episodes of “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” on our black-and-white television. She had been born long before television, before commercial radio, before automobiles and airplanes.  She was quiet, conservative, straight-laced, and a lifelong Catholic.  She enjoyed the kind of humor offered on television in the 1950s by Burns and Allen, Jack Benny, Spring Byington, Eve Arden, and Art Linkletter. She also enjoyed TV westerns because she knew they incorporated an iron moral code and would never permit evildoers to go unpunished.

Little things can be powerful reminders. The melody of the 1920 song “Love Nest” was used as the theme music for the Burns and Allen show.  Hearing that melody every week while sitting there on her lap is one of my oldest and earliest memories. The voice of announcer Harry Von Zell – distinctive, warm, soothing, never frenzied – is also part of that memory. (more…)

ROBERT SHAW’S arrangement of this beautiful and ancient carol can be heard here.

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  FROM the blogger Louie Verrecchio.

THE Rev. Anthony Cekada writes at Quidlibet:

In the months since his election, [Jorge] Bergoglio [aka Pope Francis] has produced [a] torrent of pronouncements that have been, alternately heretical, blasphemous, theologically ignorant, offensive, wrong-headed, goofy, clichéd, shallow, contradictory, or crypto-Marxist. Just as we predicted, this man is a loose cannon. He is a constant source of worry and appalling embarrassment to people in the Novus Ordo establishment, now a minority, who still hold on to vestiges of the old religion. Many of these souls, however, have begun to criticize Bergoglio, openly and in mainstream media outlets.

The latest to take Bergoglio to task is an Egyptian Jesuit and expert on Islam, Rev. Samir Kahil Samir, who teaches in Beirut, Rome and Paris, and is the author of several books and essays on Islam and on its relationship with Christianity and the West. On December 19 the “Asia News” site of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions published an extensive commentary by Fr. Samir on the passages dealing with Islam in Bergoglio’s September 24 Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. (more…)

IN an unusual act of aggression earlier this week, a giant stag seriously injured a Cambridge University academic who was on vacation in the Scottish Highlands. The animal suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the dark and gored the man, who was standing in a garden with some friends.

There is a highly disturbing element to the sad incident, which left the victim with life-threatening injuries. The stag’s victim is a man but is referred to in press reports as a woman. He is identified as “Kate Stone,” and is said to have undergone a sex change. The stag, however, appeared to have known that Stone was not a woman.

According to The Telegraph, a supposedly conservative newspaper that nevertheless endorses mass lunacy by referring to Stone as a woman, a resident of the area said:

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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.