MR. TALL writes:

I’ve been watching some of the Olympics this week, and have been struck yet again by the effects of certain sports on girls’ and women’s bodies.

The very first event shown on local TV here in Hong Kong was one of the lower weight classes in the women’s weightlifting competition. A young Chinese woman was the favorite in the event. She weighed just under 48 kg, i.e. about 106 pounds. But she was virtually unrecognizable as a woman of that weight. She was very short in stature, and had abnormally short, thick limbs, and a blunt, stocky torso; her body looked distorted and deformed. Should women be competing in weightlifting? That seems to me a pretty easy ‘no’.

But then what about sports such as swimming? Putting aside suspicions that some of the competitors are doping (see the case of another Chinese girl, i.e. Ye Shiwen, the 15-year-old who won the 400m Individual Medley), just look at the competitors as they line up for the swimming races. All of them have remarkably wide shoulders, with the huge latissimus dorsi characteristic of hard-core swimmers. They look closer to normal than the weightlifters, but are those manly shoulders permanent? I’m not sure. (more…)

[NOTE: Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day is tomorrow, Wednesday, August 1, not today, as stated in the previous entry.]

BUCK writes:

I just happened to hear a few minutes of radio talk show today. They were discussing Chick-Fil-A. I’m going to find the closest one and patronize it. I’ve never been in one.

A guy from Virginia said that he saw a Chick-Fil-A that was so crowded that employees were directing traffic and had to set up orange safety cones to manage the line of cars that were backed up on the street. Perhaps Dan Cathy is a marketing genius. Perhaps there are a lot of hungry, unsatisfied Americans who have been waiting to Fil -up on something wholesome. (more…)

  I HAVE been away from the computer for most of the day. I hope to get to comments soon.

KATHLENE M. writes:

No doubt many of your readers have sent a link to the Target ad that shows two men who are apparently about to be “married” (or who are celebrating their “marriage”). Target claims it plans to stay neutral in the same-sex “marriage” debate, despite running this ad. So now we can add Target to the ever-growing list of companies that seek to undermine traditional marriage and traditional American values. That list includes Amazon, Macy’s, J.C. Penney, Starbucks, and General Mills. It’s increasingly apparent that our elite want to force same-sex “marriage” on the entire nation, “whether we like it or not” (to quote Gavin Newsom who forced same-sex marriage on Californians a few years ago). (more…)

BEN J. writes:

I live in Colorado, in the Denver metro area, so obviously the rampage in Aurora has been front and center in the news for a while now.

Regarding the discussion about the absence of any men in the theater who were armed, I grew up in Colorado, but sojourning in high crime areas of Houston and Dallas changed the way I viewed personal protection. I have carried a firearm (concealed) for years now. (more…)

THE LONDON Olympics of 1948 cost £600,000, the equivalent of $30 million today, and the event turned a small profit. There were no corporate sponsors and the entire bill was paid by amateur athletic associations and ticket sales, in contrast to the debt-ridden 2012 Olympics, which will cost a total of $14.5 billion. Nor was there anything in 1948 like the frenzied, extravagant, disjointed spectacle that was last night’s opening ceremonies, a celebration of Britain’s emergence from the Industrial Revolution into the age of socialist medicine, multiculturalism, and bad music. I cannot imagine what the average Briton who knows his nation is foundering in debt and subsumed by mass immigration thought in his heart of hearts of this show, with its alternately sentimental and sinister imagery, but here is a comment from a reader of The Telegraph:

The world is not in need of knowing how ‘good’ we are at putting on a show, that is obvious. What the world needed to sense was our moral purpose and commitment, this was sadly intensely lacking. Oh yes, this was the UK as perceived by certain media and political elites, all of whom should be shocked now at their lack of political maturity. The Queen symbolically parachuting into the arena a composition of PR folly and stupidity. (more…)

I HAD a fascinating discussion yesterday with a woman who has been in the hair salon business for 40 years. This woman, whom I will call Adriana, knew nothing when we were first talking about this website.

Adriana was very excited because she had just invested in new laser technology for her salon. This technology is something of a miracle because with no apparent side effects other than reddening of the scalp, it can stimulate non-functioning hair follicles to grow hair again. She described in detail how it works and I grilled her with questions because, well, it was just interesting. My first thought was that this represents a revolution for bald men. The treatment is time-consuming and fairly expensive, but a man who is largely bald can achieve a full head of hair again. (more…)

THE blogger Vanishing American addresses the issues I raised in the post on women Olympic athletes. She writes:

One more thing that puzzles me about the adulation directed at the ‘Amazon athletes’: I thought that most right-wing males loathed feminism, and hated the masculinization of women, and their reputed aggressiveness and competitiveness with men. Yet they seem to prefer the well-muscled, androgynous look of some of the women athletes, a look that at one time would have been considered too unfeminine. The old standard of femininity and modesty is all but gone, while the ideal of beauty veers more toward the same muscular and lean standard which epitomizes male attractiveness. (more…)

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor argues that liberalism is a type of mental and spiritual disease. He writes:

Liberalism errs about the order of being, and so disagrees with the world. It’s poor policy to argue with the universe, no? Yet that is just what liberalism does, and not just in the economic realm. Liberalism is at war with life itself, at every level; for it carries its profound philosophical errors into concrete practice. It implements its misprisions. As I have elsewhere said, the liberal is engaged in a death struggle with his own body.

Perhaps the liberal needs something like the twelve-step program of Alcoholics Anonymous to wean himself gradually from unreality.

(more…)

THE New York Times included this photo today of 10-year-old Kameron Slade making a speech in support of same-sex marriage before the New York City Council. Kameron, who was encouraged to write the speech by his mother, is surrounded by adults (is that the right word?) almost brought to tears by his ideological precocity.

If a child says it, it must be true.

(more…)

AS a commenter points out in the previous entry, an acquaintance of astronaut Sally Ride, writing in The Washington Post, lauds the achievements of Ride and her sister, Karen, a Presbyterian minister who goes by the name of “Bear.” The Ride sisters, he writes, have changed the world. Their parents encouraged them to “study hard, to do their best and be anything they wanted to be.” The groundbreaking Ride sisters both became lesbians. Karen Ride is “married” to another female Presbyterian minister, and Sally, as was revealed by her homosexual activist sister this week, has been in a lesbian relationship for decades.

“The Ride family is an all-American family and at the same time an extraordinary one,” writes Michael Adee. Lesbianism has gone from shameful to a badge of honor.

What went wrong in this “all-American family?” Here’s a clue. The mother Joyce was known for her “groundbreaking Sunday School lessons about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the civil rights movements to the little children there.” The Ride sisters grew up imbibing the Kool-Aid and their mother filled their glasses to the top.

(more…)

HANNA ROSIN, the journalist now widely known for her Atlantic article “The End of Men,” a quasi-manifesto of late-modern feminism, [see the great discussions of it here, here, and here] analyses a paradox of  modern culture that was brought to light in the Aurora shootings. As has been widely pointed out, three of the men in the movie theater that night shielded their girlfriends from danger and were themselves killed. Thus despite all the evidence that we live in a twilight of masculinity, a fact which Rosin considers good and worthy of celebration, masculinity does still exist, Rosin notes, in a primal form. And women still want men to protect them.

Rosin surveys the devastation caused by feminism and the sexual revolution, and finds it “touching” and “poignant” that men remain manly enough to give their lives for others.  (more…)

WHEELER McPHERSON writes:

I enjoyed the post about Capt. Katie Petronio of the Marine Corps. While reading it, I was aware of one pervasive thought: this candid captain has signed her own career death warrant.

The Marine Corps has committed many doctrinal heresies in recent years (the homosexualization of the Corps, the feminization of the Corps, the zero-defect mentality, the “We-must-have-more- minority-officers-no-matter-what-we-have-to-do-to-get-them” mindset, etc.). The one thing the Marine Corps will not tolerate is public dissent from the officer corps. (more…)

IS IT any surprise that Amelia Earhart, the child-woman who was lost at sea, was opposed to fidelity in marriage and refused to take her husband’s name? Wikipedia has an excellent article on Earhart, who was born 115 years ago today. I offer it as one more bit of evidence against the widely-held view that feminism is a product of the 1960s. It includes this:

For a while Earhart was engaged to Samuel Chapman, a chemical engineer from Boston, breaking off her engagement on November 23, 1928.[68] During the same period, Earhart and Putnam had spent a great deal of time together, leading to intimacy. (more…)

AMERICA at last has an articulate and impassioned military woman to speak out against the planned expansion of the role of women in combat. Capt. Katie Petronio, of the Marine Corps, challenges in The Marine Corps Gazette the recently-announced proposal to integrate women into the infantry, arguing that there is no military rationale for a plan that obviously and necessarily entails a lowering of standards. Women, she states, are unequal to the demands of combat.

Petronio was a star athlete who excelled at Marine female fitness tests, but at the end of a seven-month deployment in Iraq, in which she was heavily involved in combat operations, she had lost 17 pounds and had been rendered permanently infertile due to an ovarian disease directly related to the strain. This is bleakly fitting given that the mission to integrate women into combat is effectively a war against procreation. “I am physically not the woman I once was,” she writes.

Petronio goes on: (more…)