Tim Carney has a new book out, Family Unfriendly, with, as usual for books these days, a subtitle that explains what the book is about: “How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be.” And, in an effort to think more about the book before it goes back to the library, I’m going to blog about it. Before I get into the content, a brief why-it-matters: having parents who are stressed and unhappy matters for a... Read more
So, as it happens, 15 years ago, a transgender activist declared March 31st to be “Transgender Day of Visibility,” with the date chosen to spread the various “days” of transgender/LGBTetc. acknowledgement/awareness/celebration (as proclaimed by activists) throughout the year. When Biden came into office, he/his staff elevated this to official recognition through a proclamation, which went relatively unnoticed by the “outside” world until the proclamation was issued on Good Friday and the day itself coincided with Easter, and a heck of... Read more
So it’s Sunday night and I just clicked “publish” on a post I’d been working on, off and on, in which I observed that Pope Francis had made some, well, questionable remarks on the issue of “just war.” To repeat/tweak those comments: I find the Pope’s comments on just war to be genuinely concerning. There was a statement somewhere about the Pope disapproving of the idea of the “just war” and stating, in the context of the war in Gaza,... Read more
Over and over again, the Pope says things which make “traditional”/ “orthodox”/ “conservative” Catholics want to bang their heads against the wall. It appears that he is deviously attempting to change church doctrine, one step at a time, that he is acting as a dictator, that he is cruel and vicious towards traditionalists. But what if what’s really happening is that he just isn’t that bright? Sure, his writing “sounds smart” but in my view (though I acknowledge that his... Read more
What is “No Labels”? No Labels is an entity which may – or may not – field a “unity ticket” for the 2024 presidential election. They state that — in time for the 2024 election — they will poll key states and, if they deem it feasible, they will offer nationwide ballot access to a candidate-pair they select to be an Independent Unity ticket. For clarity, it is not clear to me from their FAQ whether they already have ballot... Read more
You’ve seen the quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” It’s attributed to Margaret Mead, the influential anthropologist who died in 1978, though, as it turns out, according to Quote Investigator, there is no firm evidence, no time or place which she is known to have said this, though, it turns out, that quote has been trademarked by Mead’s granddaughter, Sevanne Kassarjian, though it’s... Read more
Who are the God-Fearers, you ask? Let’s rephrase that as, “who were the God-Fearers?” — because this dates back to the ancient Roman Empire. Here’s Wikipedia: God-fearers (Koinē Greek: φοβούμενοι τὸν Θεόν, phoboumenoi ton Theon)[1] or God-worshippers (Koinē Greek: θεοσεβεῖς, Theosebeis)[1] were a numerous class of Gentile sympathizers to Hellenistic Judaism that existed in the Greco-Roman world,[2][3][4][5] which observed certain Jewish religious rites and traditions without becoming full converts to Judaism.[1][2][3][5][6][7][8] The overall story here is that as Jews migrated to cities outside Judea in the 1st through 3rd centuries AD, Judaism was appealing to many gentiles/pagans, that... Read more
It’s Christmas, and massive numbers of people are arriving at the southern border of the United States claiming they are seeking asylum (the vast majority are coming for economic reasons so ineligible, and even if they were, it is not so sustainable for the United States to throw open our borders in this manner, but that’s for another day), so that means another round of tweets and articles claiming “Jesus was a refugee.” Plus, of course, “Jesus was a Person... Read more
So over the weekend (as part of my overall effort to blog more often) I fretted about an apparent trend to “demote” the Holocaust, by turning it into just one among many genocides/mass killings, and just one lesson among many, in the general category of “tolerance” and “diversity.” And as a follow-up, I wanted to write a bit more on why it matters that we, as a part of “the West,” study and remember the Holocaust. First: what was the... Read more
Yeah, actually I’m not sure of the best way to label this as I try to identify something that’s disturbing me. It has been disturbing me, ever since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 and the subsequent Israeli military action in Gaza, that so many Hamas/Palestinian defenders have been calling the air strikes “genocide.” It is preposterous and should be written off in the same way as one writes off the claims by those defenders that the hostages, the... Read more
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