THE REV. JAMES JACKSON writes: The Chicago Tribune has a rather good article by Victor Davis Hanson on the liberal arts. Also, I don't know who the painter is, but there is a charming detail on the attached painting with our Lord doing to a sacred book what other babies do.
IN THIS entry, Kendra writes: I know there are a few black women out there who breastfeed and practice natural mothering, but there is a huge negative stigma attached to "acting white." It will be up to black women to change this, not a white nurse [at the hospital]. How many generations of black women will dry up their milk after birth before evolution takes over and the future generation of breasts stop making milk completely? What is the future for black babies after ten generations of not breastfeeding? We are on generation four or five right now. While I know she means well, this liberal NICU nurse will not change the deeply held cultural values in the black community regarding breastfeeding. Defunding the WIC program, or only offering nutrition to the breastfeeding mother, is the only solution in my opinion. We need to stop this abuse and let the natural consequences of bad decision making play themselves out. Seems harsh, but it is the only option. We shall reap what we sow.
FACED WITH financial pressure, the University of California, Berkeley will be eliminating positions for male athletes and adding positions for female atheletes. That's right, it will be adding spots for women even though it is short of money. More than 80 male positions will be cut while the women's teams will be required to add 50 positions. According to The New York Times, “That is in addition to the more than 100 male athletes already cut when men’s rugby, baseball and gymnastics were dropped as varsity sports, or about the equivalent of two football squads." Such is the insane and nefarious logic of Title IX, the federal legislation that mandates proportionate resources for female athletes. The effort to institutionalize equality through the imposition of numerical standards is a hoax. Feminism assumes there is enough for everyone. There is not enough for everyone and supporters of Title IX, including many who are financially invested in the growing female athletic infrastructure, are in the business of depriving men of valuable resources. They are at war with masculinity. They are also creating Amazons, freaks of nature with the thighs of Hercules and all the joy in sport and femininity of gladiators.
LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:
Kathlene M. writes:
Do women make for better news?” I would say no. When I see a glammed-up Dana Perino, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin, Diane Sawyer or even Nancy Pelosi talking or pontificating on television, I cannot pay attention because I’m too distracted by their appearances.
That is a key observation. People tend to think that only men are distracted when the female body is overexposed in, say, an office environment or a TV talk news program. But women are also distracted by inappropriate female exposure. As I have observed before, women, in their own way, are as interested in female beauty as men are, perhaps more so. (more…)
TAXPAYERS pay hundreds of millions of dollars for infant formula for unmarried mothers who are healthy and capable of breastfeeding. These mothers often refuse to breastfeed because it is too much trouble. Why bother? The government provides formula gratis.
Here is an interesting look at this phenomenon by a dietitian who has worked with young, unmarried mothers. The most important issue here is not the money spent by taxpayers, but the cultural effects of that money, which is mindless, wasteful, destructive, anti-child, anti-social behaviors. Let’s face it. Our government is at war with children.
Writing for the Weston A. Price Foundation, the dietitian recounts her experiences: (more…)
THE BRITISH PAINTER James Hayllar (1829-1920) depicted something you will rarely see on modern canvases: interaction between the old and young. In addition to the painting above, he created this scene of a girl with her grandfather.
HURRICANE BETSY writes:
Regarding Eric’s comment that the emperor is wearing clothes and your reply to him.
Why draw a naked man? That would never have washed in the earlier part of the 20th century, when Edmund Dulac lived and worked. So he put some light-coloured long underwear on the emperor, and everyone, especially children, would have understood.
All the old fairy tale books I’ve seen have a similar illustration to go with this story, with one exception – a wonderful drawing by Maxwell Armfield where we don’t see the emperor, only the shocked looks on the faces of the citizens. (more…)
BRUCE writes:
C.S. Lewis explained this in The Last Battle. It is the Calormene Emeth speaking:
Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him.
But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome.
But I said, Alas, Lord, I am no son of thine but the servant of Tash. (more…)
IN THIS ENTRY, a father analyses the Disney version of "The Little Mermaid" and finds redeeming messages for his daughters.
JESSE POWELL writes:
It is funny that in America today, one gets the impression that the golden era was the 1950s. Everything was perfect and then things all went to hell starting in the 60s. If one wants a return to the 1950s that makes one a radical and a “cultural conservative.” However, when looking at social statistics, one finds that the 1950s was a period of holding down the fort. The decade only looks good compared to what came after; it looks quite bad compared to what came before. Social indicators show that family breakdown began its steady upward climb in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Here I want to give you a table detailing the increase in married women joining the labor force decade by decade from 1890 up to the current day (data for 1910 is excluded due to the unreliability of data from that year). All data is from government sources. (more…)
JESSE POWELL writes: William F. Price, founder of The Spearhead, posted an interesting article about his reasons for founding the men's site. He titles the essay which is the heart of the post, “Men’s Liberation.” I’m not making this up; he chose the phrase “men’s liberation.” In the essay, he proclaims, "reality – the way things are – is our only true master. We owe no debt to anything or anyone else.” He calls for "a spiritual awakening" among men. What is the nature of that awakening? He writes: Women rebelled against their social obligations and limitations and threw them off. Men, too, can do the same.
ACCORDING TO female prison guards interviewed in The Seattle Times after last week’s murder of Jayme Biendl, women are perfectly capable of supervising violent male criminals. In fact, women have just the right people skills for the job. Said one female guard, “What do women excel at? Managing people and kids, which is what some of these (inmates) are. It’s just a bigger house, more kids.”
Guarding rapists and murderers living in a state of forced celibacy is the same type of work, essentially no different, as taking care of small children. (more…)
JAMES H. writes:
The older I get the more profoundly I feel the loss of our heritage. Daily we are assaulted by a coarseness so odious that those whose sensibilities were formed at an earlier time are nearly overwhelmed by it all. I’m a tyro at video but recently have been undertaking the task of assembling and digitizing our family videos. The contrasts highlighted by these videos highlight what has been lost. I’ve attached a video collage lifted from my grandfather’s 16mm and 8mm videos dating back to the 1920s. It’s only 3 minutes and I attached a music score since the originals have no sound. Hope you enjoy it! (more…)
DAVID LEE MUNDY writes:
During our recent trip back to the states, we made a visit to Disney World. Of course my young daughters wanted to meet the princesses. Not all the princesses, mind you, since they’ve never seen “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin,” “Mulan,” etc. We explained, to the consternation of our immediate family, that we don’t watch those movies because those girls are not modest and don’t obey their fathers.
The line to meet the princesses was surprisingly short. The longer line was for meeting the fairies. To one unfamiliar with the fairy phenomenon, it was shocking. Who would want to meet a fairy over a princess? But apparently that’s the way these days. (more…)
KENDRA writes:
Laura wrote in this entry,
“Government subsidies of single mothers are not humane or charitable or compassionate. They are evil. Subsidies for single mothers are a state-sanctioned form of child abuse.”
I just wanted to add a few of my experiences to this conversation. I am sorry this is so long, but the events are true. I am a white mother of three and I live right on the edge of an underclass black neighborhood in Indianapolis, Indiana and have witnessed firsthand very troubling effects of welfare dependency and the behaviors of unwed women with children. My neighborhood is one of the first suburbs in the city, many of the homes were built in the early 1900s by architects and wealthy families as a place to get away from city life. The homes are huge and wonderful, but desegregation of the schools in the 1960s caused whites to move to new suburbs north. Poorer blacks filled the vacuum created by this sudden flight, the homes fell into complete disrepair, and the businesses moved out. (more…)
ALAN writes:
Apropos your post a “A Woman in a Man’s Job,” the murder of a woman “officer” in a state prison could not have happened in the 1950s because Americans were not stupid enough then to believe the ridiculous things they believe today. If they were alive, my father and uncles would marvel at the stupidity of people who think it fine and dandy for women to work as security guards, police officers, pilots, soldiers, sailors, bus drivers and train operators.
Ideas have consequences, Professor Richard Weaver wrote in 1948. Unarmed women getting murdered because they agree to work as “officers” among hundreds of criminal brutes is one consequence of extremely bad ideas like feminism and egalitarianism. (more…)
