EVERY DAY, at this time of year, I find one or two crickets in our house. This morning, a dark brown Field Cricket, on the edge of the kitchen sink, waved its comically long antennae, its rear legs poised as always to leap. Who can begrudge a cricket a temporary home? He destroys nothing. He takes nothing, and he chirps with friendly optimism as he sits under the bed or a dresser. In a few weeks, the grass and woods around our home in Pennsylvania will be relatively silent. The throbbing pulse of cricket communication will be gone.

Jean-Henri Fabre, the French entomologist wrote that there are few things on earth more delightful than the sound of crickets. I agree. In his Book of Insects, Fabre wrote: (more…)

AT Big Truth, William Irons writes on the bizarre neologisms that black Americans use to name their children:

The sad fact is that the way black people in America name their children reflects an abandonment of culture, and abandonment of history. However optimistically disingenuous white liberals …. spin it, the reality is that their names have no grounding in a larger coherent culture, and there are not larger truths being passed on to black children by their parents. If anything, they are being taught – on a basic level – that rejection of white Western culture is their cultural ideal, their highest truth. So when young Kanthony asks his mama where his name came from, she just shrugs and says, “Well basically I made it up. At least it ain’t white.”

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  AN ESSAY by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira at Tradition in Action looks at architecture that springs from regional influences. The essay is short, but profound.

OAK NORTON, of Utahns Against Common Core, examines in this video a current language arts textbook for first graders in public schools. The book, published by Zaner-Bloser and recommended by the federal Common Core program, explicitly urges children to become social activists and instructs them how to engage in emotional rhetoric to further collectivist goals. It is truly unashamed political indoctrination. As a commenter at Youtube said, “When I was 6 in Yugoslavia, we had to learn much less about glories of socialism then kids in Utah nowadays.”

At the blog Invisible Serfs Collar, Robin Eubank, a lawyer, writes of the goals of Common Core curricula. Children are to become social change agents. The writer Kenneth Minogue wrote of the advent of “the servile mind.” It can be found at a public school near you.

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BRUCE CHARLTON writes about the rhetorical malfeasance of liberals. As he puts it, “The Left isn’t winning by having good arguments – it wins because people are punished for arguing against the Left.” He continues:

This is one of the things I find most frustrating, and increasingly frustrating: not so much that it happens, but that so many people cannot see that it is happening.

[…]

There have been plenty of examples of coercive repression of opposition, indeed something of the sort is necessary to stable government – yet has there ever before been a situation where so many people are unaware of the coercion, deny the coercion, or think that it doesn’t make any significant difference, or that they personally can easily ‘see through’ the dense cloud of swirling lies which surrounds them?

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Although I oppose U.S. intervention in Syria for any purpose short of retaliation in the event of a direct attack by Syrian forces on American territory or U.S. interests (neither of which has happened, nor is likely), there is still room for nuance in looking at the U.S. government response to what is happening in Syria – and by extension throughout Arab-ruled lands.

One nuance is just whom U.S. intervention would benefit – whether or not it is true that the Assad regime was behind the recent chemical attacks, which still looks to me like a case not proved.

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JAMES P. writes:

In this month’s Air Force Magazine, a letter responding to an editorial about sexual assault in the military observes that this problem is the natural consequence of the destruction of the previous culture. Here is the letter (emphasis added):

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MEN have always outshone women at Harvard Business School. But this past year, a software program was introduced that allowed professors to track grades for men and women separately. Lo and behold, the women started getting better grades. The New York Times describes the sea of feminist flattery and favoritism in which the Harvard female MBA swims. You would think women would be propelled to the top ranks of every company in the world on the currents of so much self-approval, but these currents have yet to reach the required momentum.

In charge of the project to get women faculty and students to perform better (or to be perceived as performing better) is Frances Frei, Harvard Business School’s lesbian du jour. Frei dresses as a man and is “married” to another business celebrity, Anne Morris. Together, these women, who have written a book, say the most stunningly obvious things about company management and yet (could it be their cool lesbianism?) people seem to listen. These two are out of central casting. The postmodern business guru is what would be considered in previous ages a freak.

For another glimpse of the cultural Marxism that prevails at the business school, look at the work of Robin Ely, another of the school’s race and gender commissars. She has produced, among other things, “An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender,” a project in which men on offshore oil platforms were pressured to behave in a less masculine way. From an abstract of the “study:” (more…)

KARL D. writes:

A black male punched out three white people in Manhattan after saying he was “going to knock out the next white person he saw.” One of the victims is a 62-year-old white male who is the sole support for his 92-year-old mother. The blow put him into a coma and he is not expected to live. The NYPDs “hate crime task force” is now on the case.

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KARL D. writes:

Lori Duron, a young mother who has made a living writing, blogging and bragging about raising her two sons in a gender-neutral atmosphere, was taken aback when her ten-year-old son “came out” to her as heterosexual. According to The Daily Mail:

“I’m careful how I phrase things. I ask my oldest son Chase if he thinks anybody in his class is cute. I leave it open so that he can answer honestly,” she wrote in the essay. (more…)

IN the entry on television shows from the 1950s, the reader Joe A. does not agree that it was an era of wholesome entertainment. Joe writes of “Lassie:”

The father is unquestioning to external authority. Be it the town mayor, military officers, policemen, “experts,” Hugh Reilly never fails to submit meekly and obediently. June Lockhart exemplifies a form of “Prairie” or perhaps “Heartland” feminism in which, while outwardly submissive to her husband, she is actually his numinous better and the font of wisdom and correct behavior. This is also one of the first examples of a television family in which the child Timmy, played by Tommy Rettig, often schooled his father and indirectly his mother, on the true importance of a child’s wishes and perspective. Weak father, elevated mother, and a twist on the Noble Savage is a good short description of the unrecognized basis to “Lassie.

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  FROM William Hogarth's Marriage a la Mode (1743-1745)

IN “Christian Schools and Racial Realities,” an article in the latest issue of Touchstone magazine, Hunter Baker, a professor of political science at Union University, calls on white Southern Protestants to integrate their private schools. Many private schools are tainted because they were formed when the federal government ordered racial integration of public schools, and while Protestants have other issues with public schooling today, their failure to achieve diversity in these schools is immoral, Baker writes. Baker comes close to advocating that Protestants send their children to public schools where crime and “negative social fashions” are rampant, but he ends by recommending that they find ways to recruit blacks and bring them into their schools, apparently at a reduced tuition rate. He writes:

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AN editorial in The New Scientist argues for humanitarian aid to Syrian victims of chemical weapons:

It is highly improbable that the threat [of chemical weapons in Syria] can be reduced by bombing the stockpiles (see “Wind and rockets key clues in Syrian chemical puzzle” and “Iraq offers grim lessons for Syrian gas survivors“). Giving people the means to protect themselves is much better.

Iranian toxicologists who studied the victims of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s found that administering antidotes to nerve agents – mainly atropine and pralidoxime injected into muscle – in the hours and days after a sarin attack can save lives and reduce the chances of chronic symptoms in survivors. Even cheap alternatives such as sodium bicarbonate and magnesium sulphate can help. (more…)

THERE are more than 800 comments after today’s New York Times article about a potential military strike on Syria. Though they are notably devoid of the blistering, rabid hatred directed to George W. Bush in 2003, and a few comments blame everything on Bush, they are overwhelmingly negative. They include comments such as this:

This is being done for Obama to save face. Those who support this don’t understand what we are getting into. Obama is the most disliked President ever. He is a complete failure and to show his manhood he wants to do this. What a pathetic little man. Remember 9-11, thats [sic] who we are supporting, the legacy of Bid Laden [sic]. I’m ashamed to be an American. I can honestly say I am embarrassed every time Obama and Pelosi and McCain open their mouths. There is no justification for a strike.

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ALAN writes:

I would like to confirm Paul’s remark about the “virtuous delightfulness” of American television programs for children in the 1950s. I was there too, and I remember it well.

Children in the 1950s were the last generation to grow up in homes that were not saturated by television. It was there, but our parents used it selectively. They were principled enough to permit us to enjoy it in limited doses. They did not permit it to dominate our lives or theirs.

Because of that, children who grew up in the 1950s still spent thousands of hours of their childhoods actually doing things instead of watching other people do things on TV. To replace the former with the latter is, in effect, to neutralize children’s capacity to think, imagine, and initiate;  to pre-empt the most vitally important part of childhood, which is play (consisting equally of imagination and self-initiated activities);  and to produce a generation of spectators, sycophants, and trend-followers.

Modern parents who imagine they are doing their children a favor by exposing them to TV (any TV) from infancy onward are tragically mistaken.  They would do them a favor by not having any TV at all in their homes.

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