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My father was 25 years old in 1945. A 1st LT, he met my 2nd LT mother in a Louisiana Army hospital while being treated for wounds suffered in France. She was a WAC. They married after dating for six weeks, and they were married for 62 years, 8 of which were happy (family joke). My parents had five kids by 1950. A latecomer arrived in 1961.

My father carried full adult responsibilities from the time he was 19 years old. To put it mildly, that was a different world.

Brilliant, flawed, interesting Ayn. Long ago I went through a period when I studied her life and work pretty closely.

My favorite anecdotes about her are illustrative, but not flattering. In the first, when she learned her much younger protege and lover Nathaniel Branden (an anagram of Ben Rand, i.e., Son of Rand) was cheating on her, the goddess of reason slapped him hard across the face and flew into a rage with witnesses present, violating her own golden rule that emotions should always be held in check and subordinated to reason.

In the second, at the end of her life when it became clear lung cancer would kill her, her physician urged her to publicly denounce smoking to her legions of fans and followers, many of whom smoked because of her example. She declined. Their health was their problem, she averred. And besides, the champion of nicotine found it much too difficult to admit she was wrong about the habit.

Ayn Rand was correct about private property, capitalism and the meaning of money. She was very wrong about much else.

James Martin is the foremost Catholic apologist for and supporter of homosexual marriage in the RCC, once infamously declaring that homosexuality is a “gift from God.” His bishop has instructed him not to divulge his own sexuality, and he’s very coy about it. But the truth isn’t hard to discern.

The lavender mafia and its most prominent member, the current pope, have gone a long way to completely dismantling the ancient doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church.

During the reign of Louis XIV, Versailles noblemen urinated openly against the courtyard walls in full view of other members of the court looking down from the balustrades above. The whole palace was said to stink strongly of urine and body odor. Bathing with water was thought to be unhealthy, and neither the king nor the court ever did.

Every American today lives immeasurably more comfortably than Louis the Sun King did in the 17th century.

In her dotage, it appears Paglia’s finally beginning to grapple with how profoundly unwise her lifelong celebration of pornography has been. She can’t quite bring herself to renounce her long held position, but in this column for the first time she seems to recognize how dehumanizing, demeaning and boringly superficial pornography is.

Obviously, pornography is not about real people. It’s about uni-dimensional fantasies which block real people from doing the difficult work of knowing their sexual partner in a meaningful, multi-dimensional way.

Church Militant has reported that Cdl Gerhard Mueller was pulled off the altar while celebrating mass in 2013 by Pope Francis and told to desist investigating charges of sexual abuse against the late Cdl Murphy-O’Connor. At the time Mueller was Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the church organ ultimately responsible for sex abuse investigations.

Just days ago Mueller, while demurring on providing a full confirmation of the report due to being “bound [by] the Pontifical Secret,” did confirm that the investigation was halted.

Without question Pope Francis is in the pocket of the Lavender Mafia.

Here’s something I wrote the other day on another site:

The Lavender Mafia, sometimes known as St Galen’s Mafia, is a powerful cabal of cardinals, bishops and priests in the Church made up of clergy sympathetic to gay rights and gay clergy, and adverse to prosecution of priests accused of abuse. Since reasonable estimates put the number of gay Catholic clergy at well over one third of all priests (some estimates go as high as fifty percent), clearly the Lavender Mafia wields tremendous power in the RCC. When he was a cardinal, Pope Francis was heavily backed by this group after John Paul II’s death, but Pope Benedict edged him out in the papal election. Very mysteriously, only a few years later Benedict resigned, the first pope to do so since 1415, and Francis took his place.

For Francis the gay agenda is close to his heart, along with every other trendy socialist idea around. The corruption of the modern Church has found its apotheosis in the papacy of Francis. It now may be impossible to purify the Church short of a schism. If one happens, a battle will be on for which side will retain the Vatican. The schismatics have dogma and doctrine on their side, the Lavender Mafia has the favor of the fallen world.

Luther has been proven correct on the celibacy doctrine of the RCC. Celibacy is an unnatural and harmful denial of the human body God created. The average brain is about 1400 cubic centimeters. Although all the data are not in, many neuroscientists believe that some 400 cubic centimeters are dedicated to sexual function in one way or another. The Augustinian/Cartesian mind/body divide so essential to much of Catholic doctrine is a mistake. We are our bodies.

Celibacy gained serious canonical favor in the RCC only after property law became more firmly established in Europe. The Church was determined to keep its vast properties under the control of Rome, and it wanted to avoid inheritance disputes among married priests with progeny.

As a consequence of clerical celibacy, the Church for centuries has made itself a safe harbor for men and women with sexual “issues.” We see the results in these horrific scandals.

Another breathless fact free opinion column from the left. Blow even repeated himself just to fill space and reach his quota of words. Pathetic.

George Will agonizes over every little malaprop Trump utters, going straight to the smelling salts to revive himself over minor errors like Trump saying a Federal judge “signed a law” rather than “rendered a ruling.”

He’s fixated on form over function, a not uncommon ailment of many an elitist. What gets done is not as important as a leader’s appearance while doing it. Trump has revealed a real shortcoming in Will’s personality, and therefore, in his reliability as a political analyst.

Like any good leftist, Kaepernick is proud to be an agent of destruction. What he represents is toxic for the NFL and for all of professional sports. It’s on Roger Goodell that he didn’t recognize the danger and immediately put a stop to Kaepernick’s stunt the moment he started doing it.

We can agree to disagree, or at least I hope we can.

Over the years Robbins may have said all kinds unobjectionable things. Some people may assign undue importance to what they hear on TV, or what they read in books for that matter. Maybe some people first heard from Robbins that they need to carefully evaluate everything they learn from those sources. For myself, I’ve long had a personal BS detector that required no advice from Robbins.

Robbins amassed an immense personal fortune by selling himself as a guru, when in fact he’s a cut rate BS artist who taught himself how to run around on stage and use an imposing physical presence to mesmerize his audience. He’s a fraud.

Tony Robbins has been a fraud for a long, long time. It’s simply not possible to help people in a mass marketing sort of way. For an outrageous personal profit, he sold on-stage performance charisma as a means of genuinely improving the lives of the members of his audience, and it was profoundly dishonest. People who are lost and in trouble need personal, one-on-one help, not the hackneyed bromides of a distant guru.

Having said that, he’s not wrong about the deeply corrosive effects of the “victimhood” mentality. We’re all victims of something or other at one time or another in our lives. If we let victimhood define us, we’re doomed.

A number of people are asserting that the Broward Sheriff’s Dept and the Broward Board of Education worked in tandem over the past several years to treat students with serious discipline issues, up to and including engaging in criminal activity, with a bias not to arrest them, because the higher the arrest rate of students, the greater the negative impact on state and federal funding for education. And, of course, it’s well known that police brass want low arrest rates because it makes them look like they’re preventing crime effectively.

Did Scot Peterson avoid investigating and potentially arresting Cruz because he knew either implicitly or explicitly that his superiors didn’t want high school kids arrested?

The question needs to be investigated.

The president of the school allowed, indeed encouraged, the student body to turn itself into a sneering mob indistinguishable from the mobs at Place de la Concorde in 1793. A female professor played the role of Madame Lafarge, only she wasn’t fictional.

It’s an error to propose that Nietzsche inspired the Frankfurt School or Postmodernism. Nietzsche was not a collectivist, and he was deeply suspicious of the state. The Frankfurt School was begun by a group of marxists who understood how badly the Soviet Union and Stalinism had failed. They sought to establish an alternative path to revolution through cultural institutions rather than by the gun.

Nietzsche would have loathed them, and they loathed Nietzsche.

So until this student came along and recognized the inconsistencies between Marx's intentions and the implementations performed by Marxists in practice, no one, not Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Che, Chavez, Allende, Maduro, or many others, understood what Marx wrote.

The naivete of youth has a certain charm. Just remember never to take them seriously.

She’s not that beautiful. The bone structure of her face is too wide, and the downturn of her lips too severe. She will be less and less attractive as she ages.

The press wogs who singled her out as a child as “the most beautiful girl in the world” did her no favor.

It’s weird, sad and disappointing. I never have any great sob stories about the time I was in jail because I’ve never been in jail. What am I doing wrong?

High probability it’s a hoax. The “trade schools, community college” crack gives the game away.

Like so many others, Prof. Trueman appears to have a very shaky understanding of Nietzsche. He invokes Nietzsche’s name but offers no citations of Nietzsche’s work to back up the argument. Nietzsche was an atheist, and a perspectivist (small “r” relativist, but not at all in the postmodern sense), and he did coin the term ubermensch. But none of those things should be taken to suggest that, if he were alive, he would endorse transgenderism, or the silliness of the Church of England.

The ubermensch should be understood as an exercise in self-overcoming, not, as in the Nazi distortion, as a will to political power. Nietzsche despised large organizations, and he deeply distrusted the state.