THE FIRST woman ever to join the Red Arrows, the elite British aerobatics team, has been reassigned to ground duty as a result of stress. According to The Daily Mail, 33-year-old Flt. Lt. Kirsty Stewart was traumatized by the accidental deaths of two other pilots. As a result of her unexpected reassignment, the Red Arrows’s famous “Diamond Nine” flight formation will be abandoned this year. Eight planes would not create the requisite visual balance.

Stewart joined the Red Arrows in 2009. It is no surprise that a woman would find daredevil flying and the deaths of coworkers traumatic. One also cannot discount the possibility that there were other factors. The article does not mention whether she has children.

Stewart is one small actor in the ongoing pseudo-reality show of the coed military, which denies basic, common sense distinctions of sex. You will not likely find anyone in the mainstream media saying that Stewart’s acceptance into the Red Arrows caused an enormous waste of public dollars. Nor will anyone likely suggest that Stewart had misplaced ambitions and that these were wrongly indulged. At least two potential male candidates were denied the chance to see their dreams of high-risk flying satisfied. The boys who fantasize about flying jet planes are legion. The number of girls who want to be real fighter pilots is tiny. The issues of wasted money and men turned down for the Red Arrows are relatively trivial. What is not trivial is the ultimate purpose that women “firsts” like Stewart serve. Masculinity and femininity are the world’s oldest checks on centralized power. The public relations effort exemplified by Stewart is now relentlessly advanced by government and big business, and it is a deadly serious game that protects the interests of those in power. (more…)

MANY PEOPLE think that a great hostess is born, not made. There is some truth to this as some women are more extroverted than others. But even charming extroverts can make lousy, insensitive hostesses.

The art of hospitality must be learned. It takes years of practice, which is why many women today give up in frustration and brag about throwing things together, as if they did not really care.

At Home Living, Lydia Sherman offers simple guidelines for how to entertain guests well.

A woman, by the way, should always entertain her own family first. The rest of the world comes in a distant second.

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ACCORDING to a recent piece in WorldNet Daily, homeschooling parents in Alberta who include instruction in traditional morality in their school day will be in violation of the Alberta Human Rights Act. Specifically, they will not be permitted to teach that homosexuality is immoral. WND reports: (more…)

NEW DATA from the Department of Education shows that black students are disciplined much more often than other students.  According to The New York Times, “Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions.” (more…)

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

I like James P.’s “pillage” description of the left — that the X’s need “equality” with the Y’s; therefore the Y’s must be attacked and pillaged, etc.

But I think he is leaving out a big part of the picture. He seems to visualize a left consisting only of hard-core activists who use equality as a pretext in order to pillage their targets. He misses the more moderate type of liberals, not activists but regular citizens, for whom equality is not a pretext, who really do believe in equality and think that equality is the highest moral good and who are not thinking in terms of pillage. (more…)

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N.W. writes:

I found the picture of a homosexual in a Marine Corps uniform kissing another man disgusting and reprehensible.

However, as a serving member of the United States Marine Corps, I must take issue with the somewhat flip title of your blog post, “The Girly Marines.” (more…)

AT VFR, the reader Thomas S. writes:

When I was a liberal, I chose what I wanted to believe.

I was the center of reality, deserving of attention. (more…)

CRANBERRY writes:

How fitting is Guido Reni’s painting of Joseph fleeing the wife of Potiphar, given the current state of femininity and feminism. Here we have a woman with no mastery of her own desires, no chastity, who attempts to corrupt a young and innocent foreigner to pass an afternoon’s amusement. Her desire turns to rage when he rejects her, and her immediate impulse (again, showing lack of self-control or honesty) is to accuse him of rape. (more…)

  THESE WORDS by Julian Savulescu, the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, are worth reading again. Savulescu was defending the article by two ethicists who made the case for infanticide of newborns with disabilities such as mental retardation. What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society. Of course, the exact opposite is true. The freedom of liberal academics to offend normal human sensibilities is almost limitless. Savulescu is upset that those who object should exercise their freedom of speech.

READERS have probably already seen the photo, widely distributed this week, of a homecoming Marine kissing his boyfriend while children stand in the background. Wheeler MacPherson writes:

It’s all completely perverted and completely inverted – the (traditionally manly) Marine is apparently playing the part of the female in the relationship. He has leapt into the arms of his (presumably softer) civilian boyfriend and wrapped his legs around him.

It wasn’t that long ago that two men behaving like this would have been justly arrested and their lives and careers ruined. (more…)

WHILE public attention has fixed on the trivial issue of whether Rush Limbaugh was wrong in calling law student (or is she a Dickens character?) Sandra Fluke a “slut,” little notice has been given to the remarkable defense of Fluke by Georgetown officials. President John DeGioia issued this statement Friday about a student whose principles are a direct attack on everything the school once stood for. For DeGioia, the issue of whether the government should force citizens to subsidize birth control is “a legitimate question of public policy.”

Dear Members of the Georgetown Community: (more…)

JAMES P. writes:

Bruce B. writes,

“I think the essence of contemporary liberal thought is egalitarianism. To phrase it like Jim Kalb would, it’s ‘individual autonomy subject to the formal constraint of equality’ or we should all be equally free.”

And you respond,

“Yes, the idea of equality is so central to modern liberalism, and so foreign to Nazism, that it is impossible to think of them as neatly allied.” (more…)

READ more about the Victorian portrait painter John Collier, who painted this portrait of his first wife Marion Huxley in 1883, here. After Marion’s early death, Collier married her sister. According to Wikipedia, the people he painted included: (more…)