STEVE KOGAN writes:

The King’s Speech gave me much food for thought that I would like to share with your readers. One idea, in particular, flashed through my mind several days after I saw the film and in a telling way, for it came to me all at once in the midst of my everyday routines. It was as though the film had taken on a life of its own in me, and in that moment I became aware of a wonderfully rich dynamic in the work that unfolds quietly and naturally, without ever once drawing attention to itself in any intellectualized or programmatic way. 

Knowing nothing in advance about the film except that it was about King George VI, I wondered if it would touch in any way upon his older brother David’s affair with the American divorcée Wallis Simpson, their Nazi sympathies, and his brief reign before his abdication, or if anything about the king’s contribution to English morale in World War II would enter into the work. As soon as the film began, my questions fell away. (more…)

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes here:

It is necessary for traditionalists constantly to repeat the point … that liberalism/leftism consists of two main wings. These wings hate each other, and so everyone assumes that their positions are mutually opposed, but in reality the two wings both have policies which must result in the dissolution of the historic cultures and peoples of the West. (more…)

M. writes:

I wanted to pick your brain, and those of your readers, on a subject that is of some concern to me. How does one deal with the birth of a child whose illegitimacy is … planned? 

My wife’s brother and his girlfriend live in a European country, and have let us know they are planning to have a child. (more…)

SEBASTIAN C. writes:

I thought you and your readers would be interested in this rather sad piece that recently appeared in New York magazine discussing the effects of online pornography on men and women across America.

I live and date in New York (I’m divorced, mid-thirties) but flatter myself that financial security and the exclusivity it brings has shielded me from many of these horrors, though not all. There is so much wrong with what the article reveals without even reaching the main points regarding pornography: the casualness of the relations between the sexes, the androgyny, the women’s mindset regarding sex, the sheer vulgarity and ugly aesthetic of it all. And then we come to the virtual lives people, especially men, are living in lieu of physical reality. Men have always looked at “girlie magazines” – nothing wrong with that, but this is now a difference of kind. They seem to be taking refuge from something in a virtual Matrix. It’s as if the electricity and computer have replaced their spinal column.  (more…)

DALTON L. HUFF writes:

Let it first be stated that the work you have done here has been nothing less than enlightening and inspiring to a twenty-year-old college student feeling his way out of the darkness of modernism. This lonely outpost of civilization has played no small part in my transformation from a warmongering neocon to the traditionalist I am today, along with other brave standard bearers of the true Right. Sites such as this one, American Renaissance, Vdare.com, Alternative Right, and Takimag are mainstays of my daily readings. I feel I must apologizing for the tardiness of my comment on this subject, but a bout with the flu, as well as my usual college work have delayed me.

But as a Southerner, I cannot allow you and Lawrence Auster to slander the cause for which my ancestors struggled, as you have both done in the post “To My Sacred Father.”

Suggesting that the Union truly would have been ‘sundered’ in any fundamental sense is pure emotionalism. Allowing the South to depart peacefully would not have destroyed the Union at all, only made it geographically smaller. To actually assert that the absence of the South imperiled the Union is laughable. You ascribe far too much power to us!  (more…)

THE Century Association, the exclusive Manhattan club which first accepted women under the threat of legal action in 1988, has severed its relationship with a British institution, the Garrick, because the London club still refuses to admit women who are not accompanied by men.

Credit goes to the Garrick for maintaining some resistance to the demise of the cushy all-male preserve. Interestingly, according to The New York Times, hundreds of members of the Century, which is supposedly a club of intellectuals, voted against the decision and some vocally protested it. There is still some life in America.

“A man must partly give up being a man/With womenfolk,” Robert Frost wrote. It is hard to envision the rural poet in either club, but he would have appreciated the spirit of the resistance and the desire for a club where the conversation was manly. 

Perhaps someday it will be illegal for club members to disagree with women. After every statement a woman makes, the male club member will be required to say, “That is fascinating. Please tell me more” or “You are so right” or “Why didn’t I think of that?”

(more…)

  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.