Uncategorized

Procession of the Nobles

 

THIS is a very inferior rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov’s magnificent Procession of the Nobles by a band of non-music students at the University of Wisconsin, but it is still highly enjoyable. As a commenter at Tradition in Action points out, what is most striking about it is the bearing of the conductor, his dignity, authority and the immense joy he takes in the music. The commenter at Tradition writes:

The student musicians are all non-majors of music; a meager band of non-professionals. The auditorium appears all but empty save for the some off-camera applause at the end (this could be the sound of proud parents). (more…)

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October 17, 2012
American politics / Uncategorized

Lies about Equal Pay

 

WHEN Mitt Romney was asked by Katherine Fenton at last night’s presidential debate, “In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?” did he dare to speak the truth and say that these discrepancies in earnings are overwhelmingly due to the voluntary choices of women in education and the job market? Did he say that women choose fields that are less high-paying and that women choose to drop out or scale back or switch jobs once they enter the workforce? Did he say that in some parts of the country, single women are actually making significantly more than single men?

Of course not. If he had spoken the truth, people in the viewing audience would have been shocked and angry. They would have been enraged by the open blasphemy against their idol, Woman as Perpetual Victim. Some probably would have burst into tears and come close to fainting with nausea as one woman academic did when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, said that the reason there are not more women scientists is that women choose not to be scientists, an unbearable and absolutely unpardonable thought.

No, it would not have been possible for Romney to say such things and still remain in the running.

However, here is what Romney might have said to educate America and to counter Obama’s tendency to fan the feminist flames: (more…)

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October 17, 2012
Military Women / Uncategorized

The Sight of a Woman Maimed in Combat, cont.

 

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

Looking at the picture of Bush dancing with a female veteran who has a prosthetic device in place of a leg, I repeat something I’ve been saying for over twenty years: a country that, not as a matter of necessity, but as a matter of choice and discretion, puts women in combat or near-combat situations where what happened to this woman can happen and does happen, and, furthermore, congratulates itself for doing this, is a country that is so perverted and wicked that it has lost the right to exist. That we still exist is due to mercy or suffrance, not justice.

(more…)

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October 17, 2012
Masculinity / St. Louis / Uncategorized

Nonsense Men

 

ALAN writes:

If my father had ever been asked to name the worst thing about American culture that he had witnessed during the second half of his life, I am confident he would have said:  The surrender of authority by American white men.  To yield their authority, he would say, is as good as yielding their families, neighborhoods, schools, cities, laws, borders, the armed forces, and national sovereignty.

It was common years ago to hear the words “no-nonsense man” applied to someone who was obviously serious about doing his job and meeting his responsibilities. How often have you heard that expression in recent years? Seldom or never? That is because there are so few American men today who fit that description. The no-nonsense men have been superseded by the Nonsense Men. In 1966 The Beatles sang about the “Nowhere Man.” Today they could sing about the “Nonsense Man:” The soft, feminized, acquiescent, “flexible,” adolescent-witted boy-man, visible today in every public place and replete with manners, clothing, and vocabulary to match. Tribes of such boy-men are what Americans got when American white men agreed to surrender their authority. (more…)

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October 17, 2012
Uncategorized

Fighting Breast Cancer, Emasculating America

 

 

 USA TODAY reports:

Bob Carey is not afraid to bare his emotions. Or anything else.

Carey appears in a pink tutu — and only a pink tutu — in a new book of photographs, Ballerina, created to support his wife, Linda, who has advanced breast cancer.

Each of the 61 photographs in the self-published book was shot in a different location — the Grand Canyon, a horse ranch, an Italian hill town. Each has one thing in common: the 51-year-old Carey — 5-foot-10-inches tall, weighing more than 200 pounds — appearing as a solitary figure in a landscape, or alone in an anonymous crowd.

(more…)

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October 17, 2012
Parenthood / Uncategorized

Parenthood Redefined

  TEXANNE writes: I highly recommend this talk by an attorney who follows the trends in law relating to family, marriage and children. Bill Duncan provides an overview of these concepts and how they are evolving and how new law is being shaped by the changes, and vice versa. He spoke at the Ruth Institute conference (It Takes a Family to Raise a Village) in July of this year, so is current enough to note the proposed legislation in California which would provide for three legally-recognized "parents," and other developments in the fields of "domestic relations," reproductive technology, etc.

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October 16, 2012
Fertility / Uncategorized

Fertility and the Counter-Culture

 

JESSE POWELL writes regarding his recent report on fertility statistics in the U.S.:

In regular day-to-day life, it is easy to think that there is no opposition to feminism, that American culture is dead, that nothing good is happening. Maybe one runs across a positive indicator here or there but that is only “anecdotal” and perhaps illusory. However, my study on fertility by Census Tract offers absolute proof that “something is going on” on a national and systemic level.

The amazing thing about my findings regarding fertility level and the Married Parents Ratio and the change from 2000 to 2010 is that they prove that a cultural revival really is going on in the country and that this revival is systemic. The gap between 2000 and 2010 in terms of the Global Fertility Level at a given GFL percentile noticeably starts to shrink after the 70th percentile. This indicates that weak effects from the cultural revival are already starting to show up at the 70th percentile! The power of the cultural revival overcomes the power of decline in absolute terms at the 94.7 percentile level regarding fertility and at the 98.0 percentile level regarding Married Parents Ratio but cultural revival is occurring along a broad spectrum; it is not an isolated phenomenon only occurring at the very top.

(more…)

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October 16, 2012
Feminism / Uncategorized

Why Equal Pay for Equal Work is Right

 

A LOYAL READER writes:

I recently watched a TV show (I suppose you would call it a sitcom) produced c. 1971 or ’72. Office setting. A female employee discovers she is being paid $200 a month less than the man who had the job before her. Confronting her boss, she is told this is naturally because he had a family to support. Outrage. Fast forward to the present. Within a few days of this I had a daughter tell me of a similar situation involving her employment in the past month. My instinct tells me you would find offering the man more who has a family to support justified. (Forgive me if I’m wrong.) MY instinct tells me it is justified. But for the life of me I can’t make a case for it in my head. IS it justified? I have the greatest respect not only for your judgement but your ability to clearly define principles. Thank you. (more…)

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October 15, 2012
American politics / Homosexuality / Lesbianism / Uncategorized

Same-Sex Unions in Maryland “for the Kids”

 

THIS maudlin Washington Post story, more editorial than balanced reporting, argues that the same sex “marriage” law on the Maryland ballot is in the interest of children, echoing the slogan used by Gov. Martin O’Malley, who says people should vote for homosexual unions “for the kids.” That’s right. The governor of Maryland believes that being raised by homosexuals and being denied a relationship of any kind with one parent is actually a good thing and should be championed for its own sake.

The article by Aaron C. Davis features two overweight, middle-aged lesbians (almost all middle-aged lesbians are seriously overweight, or so it seems) seeking to formalize the adoption of one of the woman’s twin sons by the other. They are already legally both the parents of another boy who was born to the same woman. The women appear before a female judge who is delighted with their petition and with the idea of three boys being raised by lesbians. Unsurprisingly, they succeed in the adoption of the twins. Now both of their names are on the childrens’ birth certificates, making this document an outright lie and falsification of parentage. One small battle is won in the ongoing war on children.

Amid the sympathetic details about the immense sacrifices of the lesbian couple, we find this interesting paragraph:

Rice [one of the lesbian women], who manages a homeless shelter in the District, carefully documented their Shady Grove fertility clinic’s use of sperm from an anonymous donor so that no one could later claim fatherhood.

These women have with deliberate calculation obliterated the boys’ father from their lives, and we are supposed to believe that they have the children’s best interests at heart.

(more…)

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October 15, 2012
Military Women / Uncategorized

Do Women Join the Military out of Patriotism?

 

 

HERE is an undated photo from the Facebook page of the Tea Party showing George W. Bush dancing recently with an injured veteran. The sight of  a woman dressed in military fatigues says a lot about what a society thinks of women. But the sight of a woman who has lost her leg in military action, having been deliberately put in harms’ way, says even more, painting a picture of a world that does not value, well, anything. It fills me with horror and disgust, not for this particular woman, who has been maimed permanently and deserves some compassion, but for the powerful institutions and leaders who have condoned this.

In the recent entry on women in the military, a female reader, an Air Force veteran who stated that she joined the military for solely economic reasons, says that women, purely on the basis of their patriotic sentiments, are an asset to the military as soldiers. Terry Morris, also a veteran, disagrees. He writes:

In short, while I agree with you that women CAN BE, and often are, patriotic Americans, I reject that patriotism, as defined above, is in general the chief motivating factor for female enlistments in the U.S. military today.

His comments are worth repeating in full: (more…)

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October 15, 2012
Fertility / Uncategorized

The Importance of High Fertility

 

JESSE POWELL writes:

What makes for a healthy community? Children. It is really quite simple. A community that invests in children is investing in the future; it is demonstrating the desire to perpetuate itself. This is not simply a worthy ideal. It is a reality apparent in the statistics of social health.

The fertility of a community turns out to be the best indicator of both current family functioning and future flourishing. High fertility is associated with both positive family outcomes in the present and change in a positive direction in the future.  A high Married Parents Ratio by itself does not indicate a positive future direction; neither does high income or other indications of economic prosperity. In this way, fertility is different; high fertility is actually a predictor of future increases in fertility as well as future increases in the Married Parents Ratio.

The point cannot be stressed enough. Fertility is the most reliable social indicator in predicting improvement in all other social indicators. In the current feminist cultural environment, social indicators are always getting worse, relentlessly and seemingly without end. High fertility areas break this rule. (more…)

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October 13, 2012
American politics / Pizza / Uncategorized

The Relatively Silent Debate about Contraceptives and Health

 

IN THE latest entry about the issue of cancer, abortion and oral contraceptives, Samson, a physician, writes:

[M]ost doctors are utterly unaware of the abortion-OCP-and-breast-cancer controversy. Understand: it’s not merely that most doctors disagree that there is a link, but most have not heard that there is a debate surrounding the issue whatsoever. When I was in residency (within the past five years) I was going to do a research project on the question of a link between contraceptive pills and breast cancer, but was talked out of it by several supervisors who thought the topic was unworthy of investigation because they had never heard tell of it.

 To me, the issue highlights the power of the supposedly “unbiased” and “scientific” literature, but that is a whole other discussion.

When one thinks of how much public interest there is in the effects of pesticides on human health, the relative lack of interest in this subject is striking.

(more…)

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October 13, 2012
American politics / Uncategorized

Biden the Joker

  A GREAT ad by the RNC on Biden's grinning and laughing during the debate. Lawrence Auster captures the meaning of these grins: Biden’s constant guffawing while Ryan was speaking—conveying the message, “I can’t believe Ryan is telling such a howler of a partisan lie, I just can’t believe it!”—epitomizes the liberal domination of U.S. politics. And, as I’ve said so often, the Republicans lack the wit, the steel, and, most importantly, the non-liberal principles to identify this insidious manipulation for what it is and put the Democrats on the defensive over it.

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October 12, 2012
Education / Feminism / Uncategorized

One Woman Who Never Went to College

  HISTORY is filled with bright and cultured women who never went to college. Jane Austen, to cite one example, had no formal schooling after the age of eleven. Austen was born in December of 1775. According to the Wikipedia entry on her life: In 1783, according to family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs. Ann Cawley and they moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Both girls caught typhus and Jane nearly died.[24] Austen was subsequently educated at home, until leaving for boarding school with her sister Cassandra early in 1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. By December 1786, Jane and Cassandra had returned home because the Austens could not afford to send both of their daughters to school.[25] Austen acquired the remainder of her education by reading books, guided by her father and her brothers James and Henry.  [26] George Austen apparently gave his daughters unfettered access to his large and varied library, was tolerant of Austen's sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.[27] According to Park Honan, a biographer of Austen, life in the Austen home was lived in "an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere" where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.[28] Strange, that Austen's father…

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October 12, 2012