BUCK O. writes:

Happy Fourth of July. 

I’m a former Marine Sgt. (40 years ago this September), who occasionally peruses U.S. Marine news. I came across this article and almost immediately thought to send it to you. (Your website is like a drink of cool water during a forced march through the desert). I’m not sure what to think about this married couple. I’m a tad jealous and also troubled. Their story is described as a classic romance. Hopefully they go home together and begin their family. 

I remember what was always said about marriage when I was in the Marines. “If the Marine Corps wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one.” Sounds cold, but it made clear the answer to any questions about commitment. This circumstance seems to be about as close as you can get to a literal wife/husband being issued by the Marine Corps. What preoccupies the minds of each of these Marines, in the throes of romance, when they hear of each other in the throes of battle? How can this further the mission of the United States Marine Corps and strengthen a weakening America? 

How does a nation constitute and maintain a force of warriors (McChrystal?) and also blend them in with it’s liberal society and culture?

(more…)

THE DUTCH painter Hendrick Avercamp depicted captivating winter scenes of skaters on the frozen canals and waterways of 17th Century Netherlands. Falling into the same tradition of Flemish landscape painting begun by Bruegel, he created paintings filled with bright color, brooding skies, and tiny human vignettes.  A small exhibit of his work is on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. During a visit to the museum yesterday, I was enthralled by these evocative works with their miniature episodes on ice.

Avercamp (1585-1634) lived and worked in the small port city of Kampen on the Zuider Zee during the period known by meteorologists as the Little Ice Age, when the winters were cold enough to freeze rivers and canals. Bruegel was the first to paint winter landscapes, but Avercamp is considered to be the first to specialize in the genre. Little is known about the painter’s life, but he was possibly mute and deaf, which may account for his striking attention to detail. The paintings seem to contain every variety of gesture and pose, and they depict the full range of social types, from peasants to burghers to aristocrats, all skating, conversing or working on the ice. Up close, one sees a woman overturned in a fall, her skirts askew; a poor peasant carting a wooden box; elegantly dressed figures in black gowns and masks to keep off the cold; a washerwoman working alongside a hole in the ice; fishermen and workers hauling peat; and men playing the ice game of colf, which was a precursor of golf. Skates were metal blades, curling at the end, which were attached to shoes. (more…)

(more…)

  LAWRENCE AUSTER writes: In the wicked days of discrimination, race-conscious white society segregated and oppressed black men in order, among other things, to keep them from raping and killing young white women. In our more virtuous and humane times, race-blind white society commands young white women, in the name of female freedom and empowerment, to behave in ways that will get them raped and murdered by black men. There is another difference between the two periods: in the old days in the South, society stated plainly why it was segregating black men; in our time, the fact that black men are regularly raping and killing white women, and the fact that white women’s own socially approved and mandated behavior makes such murders infinitely more likely, are never, ever, ever mentioned. This is not a call to hate black people or to regard all or most black men as dangerous criminals. It is not a call to oppress blacks or return to the days of Jim Crow. It is a call for society to acknowledge certain important realities which are currently being systematically ignored, and to change its attitudes and behaviors accordingly.

  THE NEW YORK POST reports: Forty years ago today, New York became the first state in the US where abortion was broadly legal. Since then, New York City has become the nation's undisputed abortion capital, with an overwhelmingly pro-choice political establishment -- and an abortion rate that's three times the national average. And a stifling taboo on the subject that chokes off any mature discussion about what such a rate means for the public welfare. The decline in fatherhood in New York City, as elsewhere, parallels the rise in abortion. As the Post's John Wilson states: Thus, an honest discussion would at least entertain the possibility that the easy availability of subsidized abortion weakens the cultural expectation that young men must take responsibility for their offspring. Instead, New York's response to the problem of absentee fathers consists entirely of nanny-state facelifts -- i.e., Mayor Bloomberg's just-announced position of Fatherhood Services Coordinator, or "Daddy Czar."

THE WORLD is full of zucchini know-it-alls. These are people who’ve made zucchini bread, stuffed zucchini, grilled zucchini and zucchini matchsticks. They’ve grown zucchini and given it to friends and used it as doorstops. They believe they have explored the zucchini universe to its fullest and that on their death beds, they will not look back at this one area of their lives with any regret.

I would never attempt to tell a zucchini expert what to do with the stuff. Nevertheless, I believe there are a few squash artisans who have never tried this recipe for Tourte aux Courgettes. It is an easy, delicious and somewhat unusual recipe for zucchini pie, which I have made many times. It has Provençal credentials and therefore will instantly transport you to the sunny meadows of that extremely expensive land. It also brings out the subtle flavor of this common summer vegetable. (more…)

IN AN article in The Brussels Journal about the interesting genre of aviation movies, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

The real interest in aviation cinema lies, however, not in the perfunctory drama, but in the forms and movements of the aircraft themselves and – if one were to place such films in their historical sequence – in the urgent perfection of those forms towards the increasingly abstract. (more…)

ANGELA writes:

It seems pretty ironic, but telling, in many ways that a “thinking housewife” seems to be totally sheltered and oblivious to the genocide and slow poisoning that is taking place of women and children on the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Have you, the “thinking housewife” even thought about it? The dead zones, the illness? Any of it? Really, you should be writing about nothing else, if you were actually “thinking.”

Laura writes:

Genocide?

(more…)

A COUPLE of readers in the Twilight discussion have expressed the opinion that the male vampire hero in the movies and books is no more harmful or unreal than Mr. Darcy, the famous hero of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Leaving aside the obvious problem with comparing the clunky Twilight to the clever characterizations of Austen, I do not think any similarities with Mr. Darcy justify the romantic excesses of Twilight. That’s because Mr. Darcy is a very problematic hero for women.

Darcy is pure fairy tale and yet he is made to seem real. There are no Mr. Darcys in real life and female fascination with this character is unfortunate if it is not conscious of this fact.

I’m not saying that there are no men as intriguingly aloof and strong and interesting as Mr. Darcy. There are. But I think it is fair to say that there are almost no men who are as fantastically wealthy as Mr. Darcy and who yet combine in perfect proportion his arrogance and sensitivity, his haughtiness and emotional delicacy. Mr. Darcy is sublime, but he is one of the most unreal men ever to grace the pages of a minor literary masterpiece.

(more…)

BRENDAN writes:

I have to say that Vanessa’s comment [that Twilight represents a wholesome longing for strong heroes] strikes me as wide of the mark.

Men do not have sexual fantasies about being Spiderman so that they can “get the girl.” It doesn’t register in the sexual attraction and arousal areas of our brains in the least. If anything, it is the appearance and demeanor of the “girl” herself which can be alluring — which is probably why Hollywood is so selective when it comes to the appearance of its star actresses. But there is no “male equivalent” in Spiderman or any other action film, of the kind of hysteria we see among women relating to Twilight. It just doesn’t register with us the same way.

This is why the most appropriate comparison is pornography, because pornography is something that does register in the attraction and arousal areas of the male brain. I’m no advocate of pornography — it’s immoral and also profoundly unhelpful for maintaining a normal sex life. (more…)

    SEE the ongoing discussion about Twilight. Readers disagree with Fitzgerald's claim that the book feeds unwholesome desires in women. Vanessa writes, "Feminists actually really hate those books. It’s such effective emotional porn because it speaks to women’s innate wish to be desired, protected, and dominated by a strong and morally-upright man." She adds: "I think we can all agree that there is pornography, and then there is pornography. I think young women reading Twilight is comparable to young men watching an action film in which "the hero gets the girl," like Spiderman. Those sexual fantasies are a matched pair, aren't they?"

LAST WEEK, a reader wrote in and told a shocking story about a female boss, a woman who actually suggested the reader get an abortion to keep her job in accounting. This was an unflattering story about a woman. I apologize if I gave the impression that every single female boss is mean.

I personally know some women bosses who are understanding and kind, as well as smart and authoritative. I would like to offer a story about one of these heroic women in order to rectify any bias I may have displayed.

There was a man, we’ll call him George, who used to lay out snacks for his fellow workers at 5 p.m. every day on his desk in a large, heartless corporate office. (more…)

HOW IS IT that a confirmation hearing for a female Supreme Court justice becomes an occasion for lamenting how much women are held back? The goofy senator from Minnesota, Amy Klobuchar, and Elena Kagan agree that women still have a long way to go. And, so we have the strange spectacle of powerful women telling the nation that women are not powerful.

Although half, and at some schools more than half, of all law school students are women, the dearth of women law partners is a sign that women have it harder than men, the two women stated. “The best thing we could do as a society is to try and enable women … to manage those balances… [and] the desire to have a fulfilling professional life and a wonderful family life,” said Kagan at her Senate confirmation hearing today. Perhaps we could manage for everybody to be rich and have a wonderful love life too.

“Manage those balances” is code for more free child care and less, or “flexible,” work for lawyers who are mothers. “Balance” is feministspeak for handing your children over to the care of others.

Do these women ever talk to other women? If they did, they would know there are not more female law partners because most women do not want to be lawyers who work ten hours a day. They want to marry lawyers who work ten hours a day.

(more…)

  REV. JAMES JACKSON writes: Here are two pictures for your amusement. One is a church in Italy and the other a prop from Star Wars. 

  "THE OBJECT of education is to teach us to love Beauty," said Plato. Aristotle claimed it was to make us "feel joy and grief at the right things." John Henry Newman said liberal arts education is the process by which the intellect "is disciplined for its own sake, for the perception of its own object and for its own highest culture." The idea that the well-rounded person requires a period in early adulthood devoted to high culture and works of demanding abstraction runs through the long course of Western civilization. The "philosophical habit of mind," Newman said,  is the highest benefit of higher education. The term liberal arts comes from the artes liberales of classical antiquity, which stood for the artistic and scientific pursuits of free men as opposed to slaves. Freedom required cultivation of the mind in a small minority. The term was used in the Middle Ages to refer to the study of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, and music.   What is liberal arts today? Given the vocational trend and that students at most colleges choose their own courses, it is rare that they receive either education for its own sake or a rigorous immersion in all things that are important. Imagine the wasted dollars. Today the liberal arts stands, as Allan Bloom aptly noted, for the closing of the American mind.

AS REPORTED by the New York Times, the French Parliament has just passed a law that makes “psychological violence” a punishable criminal offense. The law is explictly aimed at meeting the complaints of women against their husbands and male partners. Feminists grow ever more bold and totalitarian in their aims. (more…)

CATHOLIC FEMINISTS may look to the writings of Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI to support their view that careerism and feminist interpretations of history are compatible with their faith. But how do they reconcile this stance with unambiguous statements to the contrary by previous popes? As noted by Allan Carlson, and discussed today at Throne and Altar: (more…)

SEE THIS stunning report at MassResistance about Elena Kagan’s promotion of the homosexualist and transgender political agenda at Harvard. It will blow you away. Among other things, Kagan recruited former ACLU lawyer and homosexual activist William Rubenstein to teach “queer” legal theory. She so approved of the campaign to make homosexual activism an integral part of the curriculum and campus life that she allowed discussions with activists about permitting transsexual men in women’s restrooms. Under her tenure, the Harvard health plan was changed to allow breast treatments for transsexuals.

Accordng to Amy Contrada, Brian Camenker and Peter LaBarbera,

Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is committed to the radical campaign pushing acceptance of homosexuality and transgenderism as “civil rights.” Her unprecedented activism supporting that view as Dean of Harvard Law School (2003-2009) calls into question her ability to judge fairly and impartially on same-sex “marriage” and other homosexuality- or transgender-related issues that may come before the nation’s highest court. (more…)