The Brown Bull

What at least one Russian is thinking...

2008-11-26T11:22:00.001-06:00

The psychological affects this sort of article plays in the minds of Russians and Americans in how we handle the next few years could be huge.
WHERE ARE WE HEADED??

Get up, America.
Get up out of bed. Get up out of your holes. Get out of your clouds.

Speak up, Americans. Speak up and out. Project your voice to the nations. Be heard, but have something of value to say.

We are not a people to be dominated. Neither are we Rome, who must conquer to feel its strength. Our strength is in our roots, Our strength is in our courage. Our strength is in our audacity to be worthwhile.

We are entering a cycle civilizations have been within before. DO NOT IMITATE THEIR MISTAKES! We have children who know not their history untouched or revamped; they know not their strength, their honest to GOD rights. Get on your knees you lost children, find your hearts and then find your blasted stomachs and make some sense of this mess.

Look past the tree you are swinging about in the branches. Look at the trees around you. See the aged ones, see the sproutlings, see the ones bent and crooked from strikes of lightening but yet life sprouts from their roots. WE ARE NOT DEAD, WE HAVE ONLY TO BE BORN ANEW WITH THE MEMORY OF ONES WHO WENT BEFORE AS OUR GUIDES. Go and seek their counsel.

PsSHAH, Russia. Go back to the bread lines if this is how you think you will become again.

Required Reading For Homeschool Families

2008-09-21T09:34:00.004-05:00

The Party’s Over
By Patrick Buchanan

The Crash of 2008, which is now wiping out trillions of dollars of our people's wealth, is, like the Crash of 1929, likely to mark the end of one era and the onset of another. The new era will see a more sober and much diminished America. The "Omnipower" and "Indispensable Nation" we heard about in all the hubris and braggadocio following our Cold War victory is history.

Seizing on the crisis, the left says we are witnessing the failure of market economics, a failure of conservatism.

This is nonsense. What we are witnessing is the collapse of Gordon Gecko ("Greed Is Good!") capitalism. What we are witnessing is what happens to a prodigal nation that ignores history, and forgets and abandons the philosophy and principles that made it great.

A true conservative cherishes prudence and believes in fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets and a self-reliant republic. He believes in saving for retirement and a rainy day, in deferred gratification, in not buying on credit what you cannot afford, in living within your means.

Is that really what got Wall Street and us into this mess -- that we followed too religiously the gospel of Robert Taft and Russell Kirk?

"Government must save us!" cries the left, as ever. Yet, who got us into this mess if not the government -- the Fed with its easy money, Bush with his profligate spending, and Congress and the SEC by liberating Wall Street and failing to step in and stop the drunken orgy? For years, we Americans have spent more than we earned. We save nothing. Credit card debt, consumer debt, auto debt, mortgage debt, corporate debt -- all are at record levels. And with pensions and savings being wiped out, much of that debt will never be repaid. Our standard of living is inevitably going to fall. For foreigners will not forever buy our bonds or lend us more money if they rightly fear that they will be paid back, if at all, in cheaper dollars.

We are going to have to learn to live again without our means. The party's over.

Up through World War II, we followed the Hamiltonian idea that America must remain economically independent of the world in order to remain politically independent. But this generation decided that was yesterday's bromide and we must march bravely forward into a Global Economy, where we all depend on one another. American companies morphed into "global companies" and moved plants and factories to Mexico, Asia, China and India, and we began buying more cheaply from abroad what we used to make at home: shoes, clothes, bikes, cars, radios, TVs, planes, computers.

As the trade deficits began inexorably to rise to 6 percent of GDP, we began vast borrowing from abroad to continue buying from abroad. At home, propelled by tax cuts, war in Iraq and an explosion in social spending, surpluses vanished and deficits reappeared and began to rise. The dollar began to sink, and gold began to soar.

Yet, still, the promises of the politicians come. Barack Obama will give us national health insurance and tax cuts for all but that 2 percent of the nation that already carries 50 percent of the federal income tax load.

John McCain is going to cut taxes, expand the military, move NATO into Georgia and Ukraine, confront Russia and force Iran to stop enriching uranium or "bomb, bomb, bomb," with Joe Lieberman as wartime consigliere.

Who are we kidding?

What we are witnessing today is how empires end. The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget. Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars. What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a Katrina-like failure of government, of our political class, and of democracy itself, casting a cloud over the viability and longevity of the system.

Notice who is managing the crisis. Not our elected leaders. Nancy Pelosi says she had nothing to do with it. Congress is paralyzed and heading home. President Bush is nowhere to be seen.
Hank Paulson of Goldman Sachs and Ben Bernanke of the Fed chose to bail out Bear Sterns but let Lehman go under. They decided to nationalize Fannie and Freddie at a cost to taxpayers of hundreds of billions, putting the U.S. government behind $5 trillion in mortgages. They decided to buy AIG with $85 billion rather than see the insurance giant sink beneath the waves.
An unelected financial elite is now entrusted with the assignment of getting us out of a disaster into which an unelected financial elite plunged the nation. We are just spectators.

What the Greatest Generation handed down to us -- the richest, most powerful, most self-sufficient republic in history, with the highest standard of living any nation had ever achieved -- the baby boomers, oblivious and self-indulgent to the end, have frittered away.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

Pat Buchanan’s web site: http://buchanan.org/blog/

It is good to know a few locals who farm...

2008-08-01T13:35:00.023-05:00

Saturday mornings now find the 5 kids and I up by 6am, kissing Daddy goodbye and preparing our truck to carry our drink stand and supplies over the 7 mile gamble to Taylor's Farmers' Market . We spend a bit of Friday preparing the actual drinks themselves as well as fixing up another upcycled bag to sell. The whole idea was as a dynamic homeschool project: cooking, finance, economics, marketing, graphic design, photography, time management all rolled up under a borrowed tent.
We arrive just after 7 along with the other sellers who are busy setting up in the brief coolness of an early Mississippi morning. Everyone is helpful and jovial with each other, setting up sun baked tents, carrying ice chests stuffed with fresh fare and scouting out where they'll spend this day's earned money. By 8 our beloved John "Day O" Daigle sings out our call to market song, "Day-O." Its time to get ready for the waves of folks arriving in hopes of good music (here's the ever so talented McCain brothers of McCain Pinion and McCain),
colorful, not to mention healthy produce,tasty homemade breads,
real fruited jellies, and some bodacious garlic grown by The Garlic Lady herself, Mrs. Daigle .
Have to mention there's even Brooke Hamilton's southern fried pies like we wished our Grandma taught us to make. Can NOT forget those.
OK, maybe not waves of folks but there is a good head count. We set out a special mat our friends brought us from last year's visit of family in Malaysia and set the baby upon it with his bottle and toy. Like a sixth sense for comradery, most of the vendors' children know just where to go- over to that drink stand that has a large mat, lots of children, occasionally free sips of lemonade and toys donated from other sweet vendors who remember what it is like to haul children everywhere!
John Daigle plays a fantastic, low key collage of folk, celtic, western (Cash fan here!) and traditional American music mixed in with episodes of storytelling.
We clap with both hands so he knows just how much we appreciate him getting up there and sharing what he hears in his heart. Those of us who have no instrument to play out what we hear in ours look forward to the music part of market day.
As the heat comes on, our tummies begin a familiar rumble and remind us we were in too much of a hurry to eat breakfast. Emileigh's is there to the rescue. Let me stop right here and now to tell you, I have to count my shiny pennies carefully, but the food at Emileigh's is worth the price. It is REAL cookin'. Homestyle meets Eclectic in their menu. As if that is not enough, the owner (I'll have to find out just who this is to shake their hand...) has generously provided two boxed meals for each vendor booth this summer. That is GENEROUS with a capital, glowing G. They don't pinch the food back in those boxes either, same amount goes in as does for a paying customer.
Now for the folks who have visited my once lovely, but now cluttered-with-kids-and-such home, you'll know I don't have time for decorating or the dollar to pursue it. I make do with hand-me-downs and the occasional clearance item my hand can't do without. It shows too. So, I can't say from personal experience what the new and crowd collector the Southern Living Idea Home out there looks like on the inside yet as it costs a mere $5 to pass through. I figure I'll get out there when its cooler. But, as the ladies from the social groups around here say, I hear its fabulous. We toured through one of the Plein Air houses (market is held in the Plein Air neighborhood) when we first noticed the neighborhood going up. People, it was just lovely. Good grief. I sound like I've been in one of said social groups. OK, it was done so well it made me want to shuck a few kids and goats and move in. It was small, but the whole concept I could idealize over. Small neighborhood, fresh houses, Saturday morning market and nearby antique shopping is just a quick jog down the road. Mayberry visits the 21st century.

Back at our drink stand, you'll find my youngest daughter, 8 yo YaYa, (Director of Quality Control and Strategic Efficiency) sitting on the ice chest, wearing the vendor apron I made, patiently expecting the next passerby to be thirsty. I think I can just hear her mind-speaking to them, "You are thirsty. You ARE thirsty. Your throat is dry. Forget about that bottle water in your purse. YOU WANT FRESH JUICE!" Literally. She does the whole Vulcan stare thing.

Five year old, Little Man, will be in the nearest clay and sand pit he can dig in with the other sand fleas. (Director of Crowd Control, as in if you don't want to share the dirt cloud, you may need to move to the next booth) Those kids take home a sack of sand in their hair alone, but the pockets, dear Heaven, the loads in their pockets are enough to stop the washing machine.

Chickie, my ten-year-old-thinks-she's-a-grownup, flits about as a social butterfly (Director of Public Relations) lighting upon each booth offering shiny things, good smelling soaps and babies in need of surrogate hips for the carrying . She organized a passel of kids on the mat last time (maybe Director of Leisure Management?) and they colored scratch off stickers kindly donated by The Smell Good Lady- Anni, who has fine aromatherapy oils, massages and jewelry. Her necklaces make your neck just happy to be a neck that day.
My not-so-bronze Spartacus, a 14 yo I carry about with me as my personal manservant, is either cleverly passing out tempting sips of our drink samples (Director of Marketing) or taking photographs with improved technique. His style is a lot like mine so perhaps our homeschool curriculum could be considered to encompasse "Photography Arts." Perhaps. Recently he has discovered a friendship in Mr. Daigle who shares his interest in the mandolin. I suppose every manservant has to have a back up skill.
The wee 9 month old one, Z (Zed as our dear friends pronounce it), occupies his time in the heat by either kicking back with the bottle or challenging the castle building Sandfleas to a demolition derby. Sometimes he changes the rules and turns it into an eating contest. Either way, the big kids don't appreciate it.

As for me, you can bet your last dollar, I'll be standing somewhere in mid-conversation counting 1,2,3,4,5... and you were saying? 1,2,3,4,5.... Chickie, don't let him eat that! 1,2,3,4,5...I'm sorry, do go on. 1,2,3,4,5...If I wanted to share your muscles with every other overwhelmed person out here, I'd have advertised! Now please~ come help ME with that tent! Daddy's waiting...1,2,3,4,5...

Medieval History Lesson

2008-07-30T11:39:00.004-05:00

This is part one of three. You can go to You Tube and see the other two parts, a nicely done program on medieval Ireland and its successful struggle against the Norse.

Mr Tweedy

Autumn Semester Planning Lads and Lassies

2008-07-30T11:29:00.007-05:00

I am sitting here at my desk, the wooded hills of north Mississippi are baking in the Dog Days Summer sun, and I am having a thought or three on my 14 year old lad’s curriculum for the Fall Semester. Having successfully homeschooled one lad from grades 1 through 12, and now having him on the Chancellor’s List (circa 3.80 plus GPA) at university, etc., I am feeling dangerously confident that I can pound enough facts, figures, and vocabulary into my 14 year old’s noggin.

the author with Michael Schumacher's Ferrari

Math we know we are going to kick the stew out it this year. Will start off with a review (I am big on reviews). This will take the form of a workbook of math below his current level; this being done just to top of his tank, oil the math gears in his brain, etc. Then it will be back to our assault on the big A, i.e. algebra, at his grade level. I will make him eat fish at least three times a week to grow the necessary grey matter. He has a natural ability to do math. I am glad he has this gene, but sad to report it skipped my generation. I have to work like a termite to digest my math.

He’s reading at a university level, so no need to work on comprehension. This semester we will work on his composition skills, i.e. making sure he can express himself on paper with pen, via keyboard and computer screen, and through speech. I do professional writing myself so with luck this will go easily. It is a matter of organising your thoughts logically and then putting them down; reading them, doing a re-write, i.e. edit the piece, then on to a final draft and then proofing the piece. I will show him how to outline, a good outline is the battle largely won. Now this is especially important for homeschoolers as to have knowledge and not be able to express yourself cancels out your work. One must know how to communicate via the spoken and written word in a manner and a level accepted in the educated and professional world. That’s the ball game folks, you HAVE to be able to communicate.

So where are we 1) Math, review and then heavy duty Algebra and 2) English Composition. Now there is a fair start.

Next will be languages, we are doing Irish and Spanish. But I am dangerously close to adding a bit of Latin. I have, in the last few years, come to the opinion that all Westerners should learn Latin. My lad hears Latin in Church, so he’s familiar with its sound and knows some ecclesiastical Latin, so the shock of actually studying it should not smash against his noodle too hard.

Now I am going to run him through American History, Colonial through the early Republic. This also acts as a civics and current events lesson. He will learn that when Democrat Obama promises Change that this really means High Taxes to Redistribute Wealth which is then an introduction into political systems, i.e. socialism in this case. You see how it all ties together.

Now I don’t like to mimic the public schools in number of topics taken. I think one of reason the Mississippi public schools are not successful are the sheer number of subjects studied on a daily basis. It is chaos set in a chaotic environment, not good. I prefer a different paradigm, one in which we work longer on one subject daily for a semester so that the kittens can really understand profoundly the topic. It becomes part of who he is at that point, not just something that will be forgotten when he’s through with it.

Here in Mississippi certain members of our legislature annually try to regulate homeschools. They actually want us to be more like the public schools. Now let’s think about this. Homeschools are successful, their students have test scores much higher than do public schools, and our academics are first rate, our schools clean and made for learning sister. Their schools have behavioural problems, school shootings, poor academics, low test scores, good students are held back by slackers, their students lack social skills, their schools are insanely secular to the point of ignoring the last 2000 years of Western history, etc., etc. Now it seems to me that they should be trying to copy us. We have successful schools; our academics are excellent, etc. Why would they want successful homeschools to follow their disastrous programs??? There is a lack of logic being applied you see. But I guess that figures as most of the know nothing legislators are products of the public schools that they champion.

Back to point: Fall Semester 1) General Mathematics and HS Algebra, 2) heavy duty English Comp, 3) American History, Colonial Period through the Early Republic, 4) Languages, Spanish, Irish, and introduction to Latin, 5) Music, in this case base guitar study and practice. This semester will run from 1 September to the second Sunday of Advent. That’s what I have so far. There is always a chance we could add something if the need comes up of course.

Barry R McCain © 2008

The Messiah Has Arrived Y'all

2008-07-25T08:35:00.007-05:00

From The Times
July 25, 2008

He ventured forth to bring light to the world

The anointed one's pilgrimage to the Holy Land is a miracle in action - and a blessing to all his faithful followers

Gerard Baker

And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.

The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.

When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”

In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.

And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth - for the first time - to bring the light unto all the world.

He travelled fleet of foot and light of camel, with a small retinue that consisted only of his loyal disciples from the tribe of the Media. He ventured first to the land of the Hindu Kush, where the Taleban had harboured the viper of al-Qaeda in their bosom, raining terror on all the world.

And the Child spake and the tribes of Nato immediately loosed the Caveats that had previously bound them. And in the great battle that ensued the forces of the light were triumphant. For as long as the Child stood with his arms raised aloft, the enemy suffered great blows and the threat of terror was no more.

From there he went forth to Mesopotamia where he was received by the great ruler al-Maliki, and al-Maliki spake unto him and blessed his Sixteen Month Troop Withdrawal Plan even as the imperial warrior Petraeus tried to destroy it.

And lo, in Mesopotamia, a miracle occurred. Even though the Great Surge of Armour that the evil Bush had ordered had been a terrible mistake, a waste of vital military resources and doomed to end in disaster, the Child's very presence suddenly brought forth a great victory for the forces of the light.

And the Persians, who saw all this and were greatly fearful, longed to speak with the Child and saw that the Child was the bringer of peace. At the mention of his name they quickly laid aside their intrigues and beat their uranium swords into civil nuclear energy ploughshares.
From there the Child went up to the city of Jerusalem, and entered through the gate seated on an ass. The crowds of network anchors who had followed him from afar cheered “Hosanna” and waved great palm fronds and strewed them at his feet.

In Jerusalem and in surrounding Palestine, the Child spake to the Hebrews and the Arabs, as the Scripture had foretold. And in an instant, the lion lay down with the lamb, and the Israelites and Ishmaelites ended their long enmity and lived for ever after in peace.

As word spread throughout the land about the Child's wondrous works, peoples from all over flocked to hear him; Hittites and Abbasids; Obamacons and McCainiacs; Cameroonians and Blairites.

And they told of strange and wondrous things that greeted the news of the Child's journey. Around the world, global temperatures began to decline, and the ocean levels fell and the great warming was over.

The Great Prophet Algore of Nobel and Oscar, who many had believed was the anointed one, smiled and told his followers that the Child was the one generations had been waiting for.
And there were other wonderful signs. In the city of the Street at the Wall, spreads on interbank interest rates dropped like manna from Heaven and rates on credit default swaps fell to the ground as dead birds from the almond tree, and the people who had lived in foreclosure were able to borrow again.

Black gold gushed from the ground at prices well below $140 per barrel. In hospitals across the land the sick were cured even though they were uninsured. And all because the Child had pronounced it.

And this is the testimony of one who speaks the truth and bears witness to the truth so that you might believe. And he knows it is the truth for he saw it all on CNN and the BBC and in the pages of The New York Times.

Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length.

But when he had finished speaking his disciples told him the crowd was hungry, for they had had nothing to eat all the hours they had waited for him. And so the Child told his disciples to fetch some food but all they had was five loaves and a couple of frankfurters. So he took the bread and the frankfurters and blessed them and told his disciples to feed the multitudes. And when all had eaten their fill, the scraps filled twelve baskets.

Thence he travelled west to Mount Sarkozy. Even the beauteous Princess Carla of the tribe of the Bruni was struck by awe and she was great in love with the Child, but he was tempted not.
On the Seventh Day he walked across the Channel of the Angles to the ancient land of the hooligans. There he was welcomed with open arms by the once great prophet Blair and his successor, Gordon the Leper, and his successor, David the Golden One.

And suddenly, with the men appeared the archangel Gabriel and the whole host of the heavenly choir, ranks of cherubim and seraphim, all praising God and singing: “Yes, We Can.”

From the Times On Line edition

Dr Meg Meeker and our Boys

2008-07-25T08:23:00.006-05:00

I heard Dr Meg Meeker speaking on the Point of View radio program recently and was very impressed with her. She's one of the few that are brave enough to speak out about the open misandry that has engulfed the Western World and is bringing down our civilization. If you are raising boys, or if you happen to know one... I suggest you check out her books. I have not read one yet, only heard her speak, I assume there is more of the same in her published work and I will also be reading her as soon as I can pick up one of her books.

Her books below:

Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, 10 secrets every father should know!

EPIDEMIC: How Teen Sex Is Killing Our Kids, Lifeline Press (Regnery Pub.) 2002

Restoring the Teenage Soul, McKinley-Mann, 1999;

Complete Book of Baby and Child Care - Tyndale House 1996 (written submissions used in various chapters);

Come cool weather, Oh come...

2008-07-21T17:47:00.003-05:00

I've had no time to focus on any one thing lately. I spread myself pretty thin these days.

Excerpt from the TO DO LIST:

Garden-weeding, fertilizing, weeding, mulching, debugging, harvest, weeding, can/freeze excess

Animals-water, food, water, brush, beat the buck off the does, remind CH about needing another fence, water the donkey again

Home lessons-write up weekly plans, organize books, order books, return books to library, pay for later books at library, find kids

Farmers' Market- clean up from last market, load tables, prepare drinks (whiz cantaloupe, watermelon, lemons, ginger, jamaica steep), make new signs, come up with more bag ideas

House- clean, sweep, dust, mop, laundry, find kids

Bills- call offices AGAIN and leave more messages to see if they've refiled correctly this time, get stamps

Find kids

I've taken to necessary canning duties this past weekend as veggies are rolling in from my garden and those of generous friends. I am not succeeding as well as I did when I first took up canning 10 years ago. I've become cocksure and my attention to details is lacking so I've missed the clock on how long some jars have been swimming. It’s a new canner, this 16 qt pot is. It boasts this tremendous capacity and you think you've spent your green well, until the finer print reveals, "Fool. That is 16 qt of liquid, not jars."

Yes, it literally says, Fool.

No, it doesn't, but I felt like it did. It should have, I'd be deserving.

That's twice now I've put in for the best Chinamart had to offer and got brainsucked. We won't go into the second. I don't have the patience to deal with therapy.

It's dry as a witch's teat here (OK, so that is a term I picked up from some farmers around here. I think it'd be accurate if I actually knew one.) The grass has given up and plays dead. You turn on the faucet and the cold side is just as hot as the hot. The squash bugs are romancing on the pumpkin plants making obscene displays my five year old inquires about continually.

The good thing is, I've gotten where I love to garden with my MP3.

I record my thoughts,

listen to radio stations across the world (when there isn't too much cloud cover!),

listen to my audio books or

German lessons.Its just me in my head time. With five home educated children, I don't have much of that.

It can be disorienting to catch a station in some metro area in the morning. They just have a different way of waking up- PUMP UP THE VOLUME! style. I resist dancing too much as in the mornings I am stiff and that can be dangerous, not to mention unsightly as I sometimes garden in my PJs. Yeah. I know. But that's my luxury, I like it that way. I don't have to sling on the slacks and blouse and high heels. I can twitter away in my PJs and happily sloppy about the mud for stubborn weeds.

I've become a Weed Terminator of late. What I can't crawl around and get out with my hands, I smother with cardboard or newspaper and grass clippings. The only trouble has been with my peppers again this year. They are losing the lower leaves and I am afraid its either fungal or viral. If you happen to know a secret cure, please let me in on it. I have always been able to grow peppers, but I think next year they are going in pots. Last year I had this trouble and they disappeared overnight.

I had hoped to have bunches of peppers and produce to sell at the Taylor Farmers' Market where the kids and I have a stand this summer. However, I now think the farmers that come to it do such a better job having more produce to bring, I'd be better off just canning/freezing my surplus and smugly enjoying them during a cold winter's meal. I love the market though. We have a drink stand and I think the kids have indeed learned much from it. They've learned some basic math skills that are easy to figure on workbook paper but difficult to do mentally in 94 degree heat, with sticky hands, buzzing insects and a line of folks waiting for change back. A couple of them have developed some photography skills and I have been mightily pleased. You can see their photos at Taylor Farmers' Market Leave a comment and let us know what you think! I set this site up for visitor's, musicians and vendors to have a place to network and look back at the summer's fun.

Its about time for me to start panicking over curriculum as traditional school approaches and summer break closes. We've been working hard at the books this month to make up for our play days in the Spring and baby popping last fall. What curriculum do you recommend for learning various writing forms? I feel like I've run the gamut and been beaten up badly by the batons of IEWs, Writing Strands, Language A, B, and Cs. I find we need something concise. Too much dithering about going on in some curricula. Kids need repetition but they don't need tedium. They need flexibility but they don't develop self control without exercises in persistence. So I am stuck with a bunch of enthusiastic fantasy writers who haven't a desire to write formal material. Errgh. More tooth pulling, eh?

This year is going to possess as many changes as did this past year. We are entering the Home School High School Zone. (Can you think Da Da DUMMMMM!) Transcripts and credit hours, acne and attitude adjustments- good times. I've considered EduTrack for my lesson planning and transcript maintenance, but it requires consistency. CAN I BE CONSISTENT?

Me thinks not without great pains.

Passing thought... just how do they do it???

2008-05-01T07:35:00.003-05:00

Once some people learn I am one of those weird home educators, I am frequently accosted with a groan and "I don't know HOW you do it." Well, today I groan back. I don't know how THEY do it!
Today my husband is taking the little menfolk (well, a medium sized manfolk as one goes) fishing at our lake on the other property. It occurred to me, if they were in school, this would not be possible. I find I have thought this nearly everyday for the past 12 years, since I became aware of people who homeschool. I never cease to be amazed by that. How can one stand to bear a child then just blithely pass it on to another person for 8+ hours a day,
regardless of tradition and civic law?

I understand home schooling is definitely not for everyone. I commend people whose children are in traditional schools and participate as a real co-educator with the school. This groan is not for them. It is for those who know not (even those who claim to be "home" schooling,) that home education is more than an educational option. What every traditional educationalist fails to realize/accept is that it IS a lifestyle. It seeps into every aspect of your being, of your child's being. Perhaps I get too spiritual with the whole concept and take it beyond necessity, but I'll be darned if I am going to lie on any deathbed regretting the fact that I never really KNEW my children, God's greatest responsibilty and blessing to my life.
There are many things I don't understand about them, but I think I can honestly say I know them. Heck, I don't always understand myself, but I know myself, even to my dismay at times. They are OF me, for great goodness' sake! HOW, I ask you, can you not stop and stare at this complex being that satellites around in your orbit daily as if they were just ALWAYS there? HOW can you not want to creep into their little (and big, if the case may be) minds and find out how they tick?? It was this desire with child #1 from the beginning that made me an instant home educator!
How did he learn?
Why did he learn?
When will he learn?
What will he learn?
Then we moved on, how/why/when/what will he enjoy to learn?
Life's crushing blows come when we are sleeping peacefully, they shock our brains and hearts awake. I do not wish to wait for the regret to set in. I want to do it all, I want to do it now. What I can not afford or have no time for, I will force toward tomorrow but never let it entirely slip off the list. I only have a few short years to be a mother. Despite the complete understanding of the stress and frustrations one's offspring may bring daily, I beg and plead, find your child.
Hold your child, physically, spiritually, mentally. Hold your child dear. Hold your child, Dear.
May your Mother's Day be full of love and peace.

Homeschool Spanish Language Club forms

2008-04-21T10:11:00.011-05:00

Several homeschool families in the wooded hills of north Mississippi have formed a Spanish language club to help and encourage children in their study of the language. The organisation's name is Club Español de Asturias Nuevas.

map showing the medieval kingdom of Asturias

The club takes it's name from the ancient province and later medieval kingdom called Asturias that was located in north and northwest Iberia. In ancient Spain this was home to the Q-Celtic speaking people that were the descendants of the indigenous Europeans that lived in the region during the last Ice Age. It was also from this area that families left and settled what is now Ireland and the British Isles. The racial and cultrual connections have been recently confirmed very dramatically via Y-chromosome DNA testing.

above, the mountains of Asturia today

The club's blog in the coming months and weeks will feature short articles and comments from the students and aslo include Spanish language reading material.

The blog is located:

http://nuevaasturias.blogspot.com/

McCain~Pinion~McCain

2008-04-12T10:32:00.003-05:00

Two homeschool lads, Donovan and Conar McCain, with their friend Jesse Pinion playing in a club on The Square in Oxford Mississippi. Amazing musicians, shows you yet another aspect of homeschooling. The McCain lads are the two blond fellows. This film taken by Miss Jamie Johnson, an Ole Miss student, on her digital camera, the 'clicks' on the film are when she was taking a snapshop. BTW these lads are for hire, I put a link to their website on The Brown Bull. They play private parties and weddings all over the Mid South. Jesse and Donovan are also full time students at Ole Miss, so no touring for them at present.

enjoy... Trey Tweedy

Anthropology 101 for y'all

2008-04-03T14:49:00.002-05:00

T Tweedy recently participated in a survey that reportedly could ascertain his accent. This was a series of questions largely dealing with vowel sounds. Hmmm... Seems they have The Tweedy pegged. Address below should anyone want to have a try.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The South That's a Southern accent you've got there. You may love it, you may hate it, you may swear you don't have it, but whatever the case, we can hear it.
The Midland
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
The West
North Central
Boston
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Reading and Listening to...

2008-04-02T13:47:00.005-05:00

I am often asked, to my surprise I may add, what I am reading and to whom I am listening, references to the printed word and music. Right now I am reading two books, one given to me by son # 2 (my 14 year old) and one loaned to me by son # 1 (my 20 year old).

Book given by #2 son The Narnian, a rambling biography on CS Lewis by one Alan Jacobs. Good book and I am enjoying it. Book loaned by # 1 son is The Abolition of Man, by CS Lewis, should be required reading in all homes, excellent stuff.

I am also reading The Little White Book which is ‘six-minute reflections on the weekday Gospels of Easter 2008.’ Well, for me these are about three-minute reflections, perhaps I am fast reader, but none-the-less, lovely little readings to be done before you do your honey snuggles and the sandman visits. Books based upon the writings of Bishop Ken Untener and produced by the Diocese of Saginaw and can be purchased at this address:

http://www.saginaw.org/

Our church offers them free, they have one for each season of the Church. They have the Little Black Book, the Little Blue Book, Little Purple Book, etc., good stuff. We get copies of them for the boys also, so they do their readings each night, this helps to keep them in the real world. I like the structure of the books, the Little White Book is read from 24 March, 2008 and ends on 11 May, 2008, and then you go to the next ‘little book.’

As for music, it is Paul McCartney, Unplugged (The Official Bootleg), which is a great live album of an acoustic concert from Sir Paul, Amazon has it I am sure.

I’ve also been listening to an ambient music CD named Ambient Music for Sleep, by Dr Jeffery Thompson. For those unacquainted with ambient music, it is not really music, just hums and drones, sort of like drifting through space and time. It is certainly an acquired taste and not all enjoy it, but I do. Cats love it BTW and it has been known to sooth children. Try it, you’ll like it.

For better or worse, there it is…

T Tweedy © 2008

The Homeschool Baguette

2008-03-31T11:02:00.006-05:00

Homeschooling can happen at any time or place, it is a rara avis in this regard. Not too many moons back I was seeking victuals in the local grocer’s bread aisle to place on the family table when I was confronted with the stratospheric pricing trends of the world economy nabobs.

This confrontation happened when I fixed my eye on an artisan French baguette. Now being a stout lad I was not opposed to paying top coin to procure this needed Gallic touch for the evening’s table, but in coin realm the egg-suckers wanted 3.99 US dollars for what was essentially a thin piece of French gift to the planet. No one who can lace his ankle boots likes getting hit in the face by pure robbery at this scale. Still, the vino tinto awaited, so I purchased the blasted loaf, hang-dog expression and all.

Now my younger lad observed this harsh confrontation and its effect upon his pater familias and being one of those lads who is talented, especially from the chin up, says, ‘Why don’t we just make our own French Bread.’ ‘Yes,’ says I, ‘can’t be all that hard. Are we not Celtic folk like the French as well, albeit Insular ones?’ What I didn’t know of course is the making of true French Bread is not for the faint of heart. The texture of the crust and bread, the lovely toasted grain flavour, the semi-mystical essence that makes French bread pain français … is as elusive as the phoenix bird.

Now, what brutal lessons! The price of oil, fuel, labour vis à vis the price of an artisan baguette in the local grocery mutated into an even more brutal lesson in the science and physics of Pain Français. There is a reason that artisan bread is so named and costs so blasted much and there is a #3 wash tub of knack and experience required to produce the alchemy that transforms flour, salt, water, and yeast to the elevated status of Pain Français.

Trial and error is not pretty. In the course of several weeks the lad and I produced several missiles that we did briefly consider shipping to Iraq to be used by the Allied Forces as amour-piercing projectiles. Affixed to some sort of rocket, I expect they could be bunker busters par excellence. Our efforts did not produce coveted loaf we sought. Now we are not slack-jawed layabouts. Mater is a virtual wunderfrau of bread and pastry making, from pie dough to cream puffs, nothing but perfection. The family in the aggregate is marvelled at by the community for its acknowledge bread-making ability, should it be round whole grain loaves, buttermilk biscuits, scones, or Irish brown bread. But this French Bread seemed to have our happy hearth flummoxed.

By law, French bread can have only four ingredients: flour, salt, yeast, and water. Anything else and it is not French bread, nor will it taste like French bread. There is technique of course, and here, the wonderful old egg, Julia Child, (bless her memory) and the sainted Kitchen-Aid stand mixer will get you to the top of the mountain, but you still need more.

Victory is in the details and so it proved in our quest to make the artisan baguette of real Pain Français. It is true that French bread only has four ingredients, ah… but there is yeast and then there is yeast, just as there is flour and then there is flour. After several braces of dud loaves we had our eureka moment when we hit upon the type of yeast and type of flour, post that moment it has been gastronomical bliss around the ole hearth and home.

So here are some tips for those not yet initiated into the cult of the baguette. One needs active dry yeast or the old fashioned yeast, the kind that allows the loaves to rise two or three times. None of your newer bread machine yeasts or ‘rapid rise’ yeasts have the needed ump to do a man’s work. Next, use the unbleached all purpose flour. And finally, it helps, but is not essential, to have the long curved pans to hold the loaves. Without this, just form the loaves and bake them on a long flat baking pan. One may go all out and purchase an oven stone on which to cook them, and the large flat wooden paddle to put them in and out of the oven, but again, this is not necessary.

After the flour settled, Arcadia had been achieved. We were able to relax with glass of lovely red wine - one of the Creator’s kinder after-thoughts – and a few slices of our delicious bona fide Pain Français. Best of all, we will not have to take out a second mortgage to do so. The family can now pour the olive oil with confidence, lather on the goat’s cheese, knowing that several pieces of this Gallic gift to mankind will do its duty to convey goodness to lips and beyond…. yum.

Mr T Tweedy © 2008

Lest we forget, genius...

2008-03-30T15:09:00.003-05:00

Lest We Forget Romance

2008-03-30T14:51:00.005-05:00

Satire is sweet.... also true...

2008-03-30T14:41:00.004-05:00

Is Political Correctness a form of insanity?; oh the dilemmas the confronting the PC lads and lassies!

2008-03-30T14:14:00.003-05:00

In the summer of 1995, my wife and I––both Evangelical Protestants at the time–-took a trip with the Catholic novelist Walker Percy.

He had died in 1990, but his presence was very much evident in Signposts In A Strange Land (Noonday Press, 1991, 1992), a posthumous collection of essays and interviews we took along with us and read to one another as we drove from the Pacific Northwest up into Canada on a weeklong vacation.

The title was fitting––not because of the scenery along the highways, but because at the time we found ourselves in a strange land between the familiar, but frustrating, homeland of Evangelical Protestantism and the largely unknown vistas of Catholicism. While others, including Pope John Paul II, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Theresa of Avila, and G. K. Chesterton, would escort us into the Catholic Church a couple years later, the melancholy and brilliant novelist from the Deep South journeyed with us for an important stretch of that pilgrim’s road.

More than a novelist, Walker Percy was a fellow wayfarer and seeker, as well as a self-described "diagnostician" of the "modern malaise" and a builder of signposts in a strange land.

Out of the Shadows of Southern Tragedy

Born in Georgia in 1916, Walker Percy was shadowed by tragedy from the beginning of his life. His paternal grandfather committed suicide with a shotgun in 1917. Percy’s father, a highly intelligent and successful lawyer who was prone to deep depression, killed himself in the same manner in 1929, just as Percy was entering his teens. Percy later addressed his father’s suicide, at least indirectly, in his second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966). Unbelievably, two years after his father’s suicide, Percy’s mother drowned when her car ran off a bridge not far from their home.

Walker and his brothers were taken in and adopted by their enigmatic and well-educated "Uncle Will," their father’s cousin, and a lawyer and author. Walker loved Uncle Will dearly and gave him credit for changing his life. In Pilgrim in the Ruins, his biography of Percy, biographer Jay Tolson notes, "If it hadn’t been for Uncle Will, Walker Percy once said, he probably would have ended up a car dealer in Athens, Georgia." Uncle Will was a Southern gentleman who held to a Stoic idealism and a Romantic view of the Old South. Though deeply affected by Will’s beliefs, the shy and studious Walker soon embraced a cynical agnosticism and the conviction that modern science held the answers to man’s origins and future. Spurning the life of the lawyer –– a profession highly esteemed in the Percy clan –– Walker chose to pursue a career in medicine. After completing undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina, he went on to Columbia to pursue studies in pathology.

From Doubt to Faith to the "Diagnostic Novel"

An anonymous corpse carrying tuberculosis changed Percy’s life forever. Attending medical school at Columbia, Percy contracted the disease while performing autopsies. Bedridden for three years, he was exhausted and often depressed. Yet later in life he admitted that despite the difficult ordeal he was secretly relieved at being able to leave medicine behind. During his lengthy rehabilitation Percy spent much time reading works of the existentialists Camus, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, as well as the writings of Catholic thinkers Blaise Pascal, Romano Guardini, and St. Thomas Aquinas. An insightful observer of human nature and relationships, Percy had growing doubts about his scientific, materialist view of reality. Years later he wrote,

"What did at last dawn on me as a medical student and intern, a practitioner, I thought, of the scientific method, was that there was a huge gap in the scientific view of the world. This sector of the world about which science could not utter a single word was nothing less than this: what it is like to be an individual living in the United States in the twentieth century." ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 213)

This realization led Percy to make three major decisions in short order in his mid-thirties: to become a full-time writer, marry, and become Catholic. Percy and Mary Bernice Townsend, (affectionately called "Bunt"), were married in 1946, and entered the Catholic Church the following year. Not long afterwards, they moved to the small town of Covington, Louisiana, where Percy wrote and lived until his death in 1990.

Initially, during the 1950s, Percy wrote technical articles on semiotics – the study of language – for various scientific and theological journals, as well as pieces about psychiatry, culture, and the South for Commonweal, America, and other magazines. Many of these articles were later collected in The Message in the Bottle (Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1975, 1986), subtitled "How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do with the Other." In the author’s note, Percy wrote that his "recurring interest over the years has been the nature of human communication and, in particular, the consequences of man’s unique discovery of the symbol . . ."

Convinced that he needed a different literary vehicle for taking his observations to a larger audience, Percy wrote two novels during the 1950s. Neither were published (Percy apparently burned one of the manuscripts), but his third novel, The Moviegoer, was published in 1961.

Initially ignored and selling poorly, the novel was the surprise winner of the National Book Award in 1962. Over the course of the next three decades Percy wrote five more novels, published The Message in the Bottle, wrote occasional articles, and produced the most unique and insightful "self-help" book ever written, Lost In The Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983). Each of these works, in their own way, grappled with entwining anthropological concerns: the pervasive influence of scientism on modern man, the resulting "modern malaise," man’s need and quest for life-giving symbols and signs, and man as wayfarer and homo viator. Percy pursued these issues with the belief that the modern novelist is meant to be a sort of "diagnostician," probing and testing the human condition through his literary craft.

The Cartesian Split and the Failure of Scientism

Percy rightly dismissed the notion that people can live without an anthropological vision, that is, a specific understanding of who man is and what he meant for. "Everyone has an anthropology," he wrote in the essay, "Rediscovering A Canticle For Leibowitz." "There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question." His own conversion was due, in large part, to the realization that scientism –– the belief that the scientific method and the technology it produces can provide answers to man’s deepest questions and longings –– was untenable and, in fact, was a lie. As a trained physician, Percy had respect for science when properly practiced and understood. But he saw many theories making claims to being "scientific," but in reality were ideological positions based on a subjective and self-serving view of reality. In the essay "Culture, The Church, And Evangelization," Percy wrote,

"The distinction which must be kept in mind is that between science and what can only be called ‘scientism.’ . . . [Scientism] can be considered only as an ideology, a kind of quasi-religion––not as a valid method of investigating and theorizing which comprises science proper––a cast of mind all the more pervasive for not being recognized as such and, accordingly, one of the most potent forces which inform, almost automatically and unconsciously, the minds of most denizens of modern industrial societies like the United States." ("Culture, The Church, And Evangelization," p. 297).

Percy traced scientism back to Continental philosopher René Descartes, believing the Cartesian distinction between the thinking mind and the rest of the physical world had finally produced its evil fruit in the twentieth century. This radical dualism shaped the ideologies of Communism and Naziism, the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and secular humanism. Each of these belief systems, however well or poorly articulated, rejected God and set up man as the ultimate reference point for all of human activity, whether that activity was political, social, or sexual. Now freed from the confines of the supernatural order and objective truth, man could create and customize his own reality: totalitarian, egalitarian, hedonistic, or consumer-oriented.

Percy often noted the paradoxical fact that man can form a perfect scientific theory explaining the material world –- but cannot adequately account for himself in that theory. Man is the round peg never quite fitting into the square hole of scientism. "Our view of the world, which we get consciously or unconsciously from modern science, is radically incoherent," Percy wrote in his essay "The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind." Again, science must either recognize its own limits or create confusion: "A corollary of this proposition is that modern science is itself radically incoherent, not when it seeks to understand things and subhuman organisms and the cosmos itself, but when it seeks to understand man, not man’s physiology or neurology or his bloodstream, but man qua man, man when he is peculiarly human. In short, the sciences of man are incoherent." ("The Fateful Rift: The San Andreas Fault In The Modern Mind," p. 271). In a self-interview, "Questions They Never Asked Me," he put the matter more bluntly:

"This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, ‘Scientific humanism.’ That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and infinite delight; i.e., God." ("Questions They Never Asked Me," p. 417)

The Modern Malaise

In each of Percy’s novels the main character realizes that something is seriously wrong, but cannot identify the source of the anxiety. These characters suffer from the "modern malaise," an unknown but palpable dis-ease –– a sense of despair not easily brought into focus and identified. The epigraph at the start of The Moviegoer quotes from Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death: "…the specific character of despair is specifically this: it is unaware of being despair." In The Moviegoer, the young movie-going Binx Bolling states that "the malaise is the pain of loss. The world is lost to you, the world and the people in it, and there remains only you and the world and you no more able to be in the world than Banquo’s ghost." A successful stockbroker, Binx is unsettled by his own gnawing emptiness and is finally compelled to seek out the solution. When considering whether or not God exists, Binx reflects that, "as everyone knows, the polls report that 98% of Americans believe in God and the remaining 2% are atheists and agnostics — which leaves not a single percentage point for a seeker. . . . Have 98% of Americans already found what I seek or are they so sunk in everydayness that not even the possibility of a search has occurred to them?"

This malaise, Percy makes clear, is not simply the corruption and abandonment of Judeo-Christian morality. Immorality is a symptom, "not a primary phenomenon, but rather an ontological impoverishment" ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 214). The real issue is more basic: What is man and who am I as a specific man? The average person is led by the dominant culture to believe that everything is fine and life is set –– a comfortable existence is for the taking. "But something is wrong," Percy notes. "He has settled everything except what it is to live as an individual. He still has to get through an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. . . . What does this man do with the rest of the day? the rest of his life?" ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 213).

This is the predicament of Dr. Tom More, first introduced in Love in the Ruins (1971), and reappearing in The Thanatos Syndrome (1987). A self-described "bad Catholic" and a psychiatrist, More is a widower falling apart at the seams, filled with terror, anxiety, and lust. He confesses that he is "possessed by terror and desire and live a solitary life. My life is a longing, longing for women, for the Nobel prize, for the hot bosky bite of bourbon whisky and other great heart-wrenching longings that have no name." As potential catastrophe threatens to overwhelm him, More must come to grips with the "malaise" infecting "the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world." Similar challenges confront the characters in Percy’s other novels. While the "malaise" which Percy describes is distinctly modern, it is inherently ancient in nature; it is the longing of man for meaning in a world that has abandoned any real notion of transcendent truth.

Man as Wayfarer and Homo viator

Although influenced by the work of Sartre and Camus, Percy’s "existentialism" is not a despairing, atheistic sort, but a hopeful, theistic sort. This can easily be missed due to the darkness that often fills the pages of his novels. An example of this is Lancelot (1977), Percy’s most raw portrayal of man’s decadence and loss of self. A read could easily misunderstand the book, for it turns on one single word, uttered at the very end. That word is the difference between Lancelot being nihilisitic and being theistic. Man’s existential crisis –– his confusion and despair over his own existence –– can only be satisfactorily addressed by Catholicism and its incarnational, sacramental vision. In "The Holiness of the Ordinary," Percy writes,

"What distinguishes Judeo-Christianity in general from other world religions is its emphasis on the value of the individual person, its view of man as a creature in trouble, seeking to get out of it, and accordingly on the move. Add to this anthropology the special marks of the Catholic Church: the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, which, whatever they do, confer the highest significance upon the ordinary things of this world, bread, wine, water, touch, breath, words, talking, listening––and what do you have? You have a man in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery; a pilgrim whose life is a searching and a finding. Such a view of man as wayfarer is, I submit, nothing else than a recipe for the best novel-writing from Dante to Dostoevsky." ("The Holiness of the Ordinary," p. 369)

Percy explained that his anthropology is "scriptural" and embraces "Gabriel Marcel’s Homo viator." ("An Interview with Zolta´n Aba´di-nagy," p. 375). Man’s search is for himself and for the Other. In the end, finding one means finding the other, for we cannot see our humanity rightly unless we see ourselves in relation to the Creator. In several of Percy’s novels, the main character begins to see himself more clearly at he embraces unexpected love. This human love eventually points him beyond himself to the ultimate source of sacrificial love. Percy’s depictions of these moments of recognition and transition are masterful, always understated, quietly observing the ordinary nature and commonness surrounding such significant (and sign-filled) events.

The Diagnostic Novel

While many novelists are content to be literary dermatologists, Percy was a literary surgeon – or, better yet, a literary coroner –– cutting beneath the skin and examining the very blood and guts of the modern man:

"To the degree that a society has been overtaken by a sense of malaise rather than exuberance, by fragmentation rather than wholeness, the vocation of the artist, whether novelist, poet, playwright, filmmaker, can perhaps be said to come that much closer to that of the diagnostician rather than the artist’s celebration of life in a triumphant age. Something is indeed wrong, and one of the tasks of the serious novelist is, if not to isolate the bacullus under the microscope, at least to give the sickness a name, to render the unspeakable speakable. Not to overwork the comparison, the artist’s work in such times is assuredly not that of the pathologist whose subject matter is a corpse and whose question is not ‘What is wrong?’ but ‘What did the patient die of?" For I take it as going without saying that the entire enterprise of literature is like that of a physician undertaken in hope. Otherwise, why would be here? Why bother to read, write, teach, study, if the patient is already dead?––for, in this case, the patient is the culture itself." ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 206).

In describing his novels as "diagnostic," Percy turned to Aquinas and drew a careful distinction between art and morality. He once explained that "art is making; morality is doing…. This is not to say that art, fiction, is not moral in the most radical sense — if it is made right. But if you write a novel with the goal of trying to make somebody do right, you’re writing a tract — which may be an admirable enterprise, but it is not literature." He goes on to say that what interests him as a novelist is the "looniness" of modern man, "the normal denizen of the Western world who, I think it is fair to say, doesn’t know who he is, what he believes, or what he is doing. This unprecedented state of affairs is, I suggest, the domain of the ‘diagnostic’ novelist."

Here lies, I think, the greatness of Percy’s writing. Although a brilliant stylist, he provides far more than a mere description of the epidermis, but cuts into the sinew and fiber of the human soul. Once there, he honestly names the disease and confusion he sees, and also indicates that a cure does exist. He works in a world of curious messages, sorting through ciphers and codes, plunging the depths of human language in search of further clues. "The contemporary novelist, in other words, must be an epistemologist of sorts," Percy explains, "He must know how to send messages and decipher them. The messages may come not in bottles but rather in the halting and muted dialogue between strangers, between lovers and friends." ("Diagnosing The Modern Malaise," p. 217).

Carl Olson is the editor of www.IgnatiusInsight.com. He is the co-author of The Da Vinci Hoax: Exposing the Errors in The Da Vinci Code and author of Will Catholics Be "Left Behind"? He resides in a top secret location in the Northwest somewhere between Portland, Oregon and Sacramento, California.

The Resurrection of Christ

2008-03-23T09:18:00.000-05:00

A Time for a Walkabout

2008-03-20T13:49:00.000-05:00

For oft when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils.

-William Wordsworth

My advice for today...
Today's work is done; for better or worse, in completion or in progress, let it be. Exit through the portal to the other world which is wakening from quiet slumber. Look around, let the youth see. Have it drawn, have it photographed, have it painted; the memory may not be as vivid in years hence. For it is these days, these sights, they will remember. It is these which will bring comfort and warmth when your own portals no longer open.

http://highland.hitcho.com.au/naturejournals.htm

- Sonya After Play

The Crunchy Con Phenomenon Grows

2008-03-15T13:14:00.000-05:00

A Crunchy Con Manifesto
By Rod Dreher

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much scepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

--Rod Dreher is a writer and editor at the Dallas Morning News. A native of south Louisiana, he has worked at National Review, the New York Post, and the Washington Times. Crunchy Cons is his first book. You may e-mail him at rdreher@dallasnews.com.

Homeschool Curriculum Selection

2008-03-15T11:41:00.001-05:00

I know there are dozens of popular curricula that circulate the Home School world. Some families prefer these “pre-fab” curricula, some prefer to design their own, still others prefer none at all, a more free-style approach that is sometimes referred to as Un-schooling. Here I will outline my particular method of setting up the curriculum of a just-turned-14 year old.

At this age my focus is getting the lad ready for university work. Here I have the advantage of already having homeschooled one son from grades 1 through 12, then getting him into university, where he is now a 4.0 student. My deductions from this experience are one needs 1) quality math instruction and 2) quality English composition skills. Those two subjects do not sound like a full plate for a 14 year old, but I have observed, not only my own homeschooled boys, but other homeschooling families that these should be the primary focus. The rest of the subjects are normally covered in an organic process via the children’s ravenous interests and reading.

(the lighter side of Math...)

Homeschool children live the stuff, they excel in history, science, geography, languages, etc., and these topics become to a large extent self-directed. Believe, they will know more than you on the topic and will in fact lecture you for hours. Children can drive you nuts when they become enamoured with a certain topic. It becomes a matter of making them pace themselves. My now 14 year old developed a love of Carthage. He could and would tell you every known leader of the place, the full chronology of its history, its wars, social structure, religion, archaeology, geography, the Y chromosome DNA of the male descendants of that population, their root ethnicity, the languages of, etc. ad infinitum. I let him run with this and used this intellectual fire as a tool with which he learned a wide variety of subjects.

With subjects such as science or geography, is large a matter of selected reading and as we all know, reading comprehension is not an issue with homeschoolers. Most read at the university level by age 13 or 14, so they are often just off to the races once a subject is put before them. Back to my point however, with math and English composition I find you have to monitor the child’s ability and execution of their ability. For these reason I use a structured format to teach this two subjects.

I did the normal internet research to see what the poor public school kids were learning in this age group. Here I always caution: do not attempt to copy what the public school kids do or else you may wind up with the problems and poor performance that is the norm in public schools. What you want to do is to see what level of math and writing skills the public schools are teaching at given age or grade level. Then organise your math and English comp curriculum around this goal, appropriate to your child’s age or development level.

I do this by visiting the school supply shops in person, looking through the many workbooks available, making my selection and that is how my son’s semester becomes organised. Using an example of a 13/14 year old, this means selecting the best Algebra workbooks, I use several at one time as each will have strengths. Now one nice thing about the internet is there are good public school teachers and math enthusiasts online who post all manner of downloadable problem work sheets that can be printed off. These are great, as practice does make perfect in math.

Here I will interject; I do not use the multiple subject daily schedules as do the public schools. Those poor public school kids take so many subjects daily that by the time they get into a math groove, have their seat warm, etc., a bell rings and they are off to some liberal arts nonsense to be made a socialised, gender neutral, worker bee. It is better to take on a topic like Algebra in bigger bites. Usually this means two hours sessions five days a week, seated at the breakfast table. Short breaks are allowable. Work books, practice problem sheets, calculator, mechanical pencil, eraser, practice paper, cup of tea, and then your lad or lassie washed and fed and ready to get down to business.

The advantage in this intensive approach is that the young one will actually reach a point that they understand what they are doing in a fundamental way and progressively move through each level of complexity of Algebra, then on to Geometry, etc. Right now I have my 14 year old doing three subjects daily, 1) Algebra, 2) English composition and 2) Foreign language. I organise a Fall and Spring Semester that more or less follows the public schools in duration.

A tip for you who have not yet taken a child to the university level: make sure you create a record of each semester’s work, make up a ‘report card’. Include the topics taken, final grade, etc. and print this on card stock. You will need this later when a transcript is called for. You can have the ‘transcripts’ notarized by a Notary Public when needed. Now should you foolishly think that I have dropped the ball on science instruction, not so. My 14 year old is on a tear about computers, making them, the technical parts of the beasts. He has the bit between his teeth, and here I am an adult who uses computers in my profession, yet I call him into the room when I need tech advice, i.e. he is doing a self directed study in this facet of information technology. Basic biology and earth science modules are included as well.

On his English Comp, that is pretty straight forward also. Do a little online research; check to see what the public schools are teaching a child at the level you need; once you have this minimum level, visit an urban or online educational supply shop. I use workbooks that deal with English grammar and composition. Again, I buy several that cover the same area and use them simultaneously. This gives some variety to the daily grind.

Some care must be given when purchasing any education materials, as we all know they will have varying degrees of politically correct nonsense. Best to stay clear of this as much as you can. We spend less time on English Comp than on the math, the norm would be three or four days a week, usually in two hours a session. This assumes the child writes, has keyboard skills, etc. Obviously all children by age 14 should know how to type as us old timers call it, or use a computer keyboard as we say in the 21st Century. The workbooks have writing exercises, but do supplement these with all manner of ad hoc writing projects, from having your child keep a journal, write up accounts of trips, write for you any time a day-to-day communication is needed to neighbours, to the milk man, etc. As with math, practice makes perfect.

The workbooks will make sure the child knows the nomenclature of English grammar and composition. It is very important to know not only how to do something, but how to take instruction in doing a thing. That is true both for English Comp and Math. This knowledge of nomenclature will be needed when it comes time to take university entrance exams. Your child should not only know the material, but be able to recognise instructions relating to the material.

The foreign language we are doing now is Gaeilge. This is a fun subject, taught at the breakfast table, and is related to our family interests in our heritage. We use modern CDs, books, and conversation practice. Three or four sessions a week, the casual speaking of the language off and on all the time seems to work for us. We will likely add another European language this year, Spanish or French. The one ‘regret’ I have with language is not doing Latin. I think every child in the West should learn Latin. I am lucky enough to hear it used on a weekly basis in Church. I see the wisdom and usefulness in Latin, and wish I would have made this realisation much earlier. Learning any foreign language is an excellent exercise in how to learn a language. This is a useful skill that will serve the child later in life as well.

With this type of curriculum there is no ‘homework’. All ‘sit-down’ work is done during the course of each day. With the intensive or ‘modular’ approach to each topic, the child learns and understands the fundamentals of Math and English Comp and even develops a comfort factor in the subjects. This format serves them well when they move on to university work.

Trevelyan Tweedy (c) 2008

On Being All That You Can't Be-

2008-03-04T21:45:00.000-06:00

Mr. Gelernter's article is wonderfully well-written. As you may soon see, I will never write that well. Instead I use crutches such as italics to indicate caustic sarcasm. If I really need to press upon my reader, I use this nifty bold. I have a particular affinity for CAPITALS (and some side notes in parentheses.) I sometimes daydream of going back to all the educational facilities that had to deal with me as a student and offer some sort of apology for not being more attentive in all of my composition classes. (Infatuation with the intricate design of Chinese thumbtacks was a serious distraction.) Then I wake up and consider demanding a written apology for trying to brainwash me into thinking I could skate along with their A's, B's and honor rolls then suddenly POOF! I would be certifiably EDUCATED. Frankly, I did not know what learning was until becoming associated with the home schooled life. Ugh, I digress, that’s for another post.
Allow me to expand Mr. Gelernter's topic of certain consequences of feminism to encompass a bit of my own rant about EQUALITY. Men and women are not equal. There, I said it. While I am at it, let me add, people are not equal, nor are they equally deserving either.

As a younger woman, I had little patience for someone wanting to strap a "male" term to my doings or thoughts. NEVER should one tell me I couldn't do something because I was a GIRL. I'd silently swear you out and do it even if it meant dislocating a body part in the process. My father taught me how to work on my cars, install a concrete wall, harvest shrimp out of a pond, trim the sails of a large sailboat, throw a decent right hook, construct a simple motor, paint a self portrait, appreciate a sunset from the roof of our two story house, shoot a double barrel 20, 16, and 12 gauge (then pull out cactus spines from my backside after said 20g blew me backwards into a patch,) drive a variety of trucks and tractors, plumb every sink of every house I've ever lived in, and the list goes on. All that being said, my mother taught me how do housework (we didn't really succeed in routine maintenance of housework though), she taught me how to make a roué, how to mow, how to stand beside your husband and work even harder than one did when living under her father's roof, how to care for terminally ill loved ones, how to shop frugally, how to sew, how to paint a room and the list goes on. Through all of those experiences, the most important lesson they taught me was how to be CAPABLE, not equal.

Lessons in self esteem, someone TELLING me I am capable, would never have brought me as far as I have come. It was having the opportunities to fail or succeed. It was going through the motions, walking the walk. It was learning to love learning.

Before having children, I thought telling one’s children how wonderful they were would give them confidence. Then as a young mother with her first daughters, I discovered it wasn't me who could relay that to them, but they who would have to achieve it, get out there and dig for it. I feel obligated to provide opportunities for my daughters, but not to convince them they capable of every goal they set. You might be amazed how, in this pursuit, I've met with folks who confuse my attempts with creating little femi-nazis. That's not my goal at all. I've had some 37 years of feministic content and restrictions (yes, restrictions) shoved in my face, I am now tired of it. Like many "movements", it is out of control. I am tired of the PC police corrections.

I am exhausted keeping up with the latest acceptable terminology and buzz words. I am numb to the laughable encouragements and self help the "community" offers me. I fear our political system has indeed suffered from too many women seeking to protect the world from common sense. Have you spoken with some metro-men lately? Have you watched the news and Heaven forbid the reality shows with urban people trying to cope with, uh… life? I'll grant you some of it is for TV shock values and hype, but all I can think when watching the sobbing, the selfishness, the “scaredy cats”, the safety police and the haute (I want that pronounced HATE) couture is there were too many mommies at the first YOU CAN DO IT pep rally. These people can't boil water but yet have the self image of Wolfgang Puck.

Now, please know I do not want my daughters to become rug mats and automatons for any testosterone out here. I want them to be strong, be independent, honorable, faithful, and yes, loving, compassionate and generous. I want them to even be… feminine, not equal.

I want my children to know there are no such things as knights in shining armor to come rescue them from bad decisions in life.

No, they can not be whatever they want to be “if only they put their minds to it.” Male or female, we are not equal; humans in general are not equal. It’s a ridiculous concept. My sons are to be men and my daughters are to be women, each with wonderful strengths, talents, weaknesses, and limitations as individuals. It makes a society work to have differences. Please remove those heads from the sand! Once we were afraid of society dictating that my daughter can't play with trucks. Now I fear society dictating not only must my daughter play with trucks but my son must take sexual harassment classes by 1st grade. Couldn’t we just work on being congenial, respectful, and considerate to one another?? Don’t fear me because I ovulate.

It doesn't require a state of genius or a Y chromosome to recognize how our language, our political system, our judicial system and our educational system have been hurt from the force to accommodate the absurdity of today’s feministic wiles. I still have a twinge of loath for certain male terms applied to females in traditional male roles, but I can not stand to read a child rearing book full of "she"s and "her"s. Yes, I also acknowledge there is a difference in pay in some positions between men and women. Once women worked toward the ability to vote, now we push for getting paid to leave our jobs and take time to have a baby. Men don’t get such a luxury. I am guilty of whining because I am not as employable as I was before leaving the work force to stay home and educate my children. Yet, neither would a man be if he left. Also, if I do decide to apply for a job, don't you dare hire me because you have a quota to fill. If I can't get respect by being a respectABLE person, don't sue someone over it for me either, we’re not equal.

This blogperson's rant is over. I hope Mr. Gelernter isn't reading this. He'd just have to get out that red pen.

William F Buckley

2008-02-28T17:04:00.000-06:00

Requiescat In Pace

We Did It

2008-02-28T10:40:00.000-06:00

Did what you say?

Well, we have a son in university now with a 4.0 GPA and on the Chancellor's list. I will post a short note or three on the particulars as The Brown Bull progresses. The nice thing about doing one child is you realise the mistakes you made and the poor next child up really catches it. (i.e. its the math you need to focus on...) Story and photos to follow.

Barry R McCain

Feminism and the English Language

2008-02-26T08:30:00.000-06:00

by David Gelernter

How can I teach my students to write decently when the English language has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Academic-Industrial Complex? Our language used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers. But in the 1970s and '80s, arrogant ideologues began recasting English into heavy artillery to defend the borders of the New Feminist state. In consequence we have all got used to sentences where puffed-up words like "chairperson" and "humankind" strut and preen, where he-or-she's keep bashing into surrounding phrases like bumper cars and related deformities blossom like blisters; they are all markers of an epoch-making victory of propaganda over common sense.

We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it. Today, as college students and full-fledged young English teachers emerge from the feminist incubator in which they have spent their whole lives, this victory of brainless ideology is on the brink of becoming institutionalized. If we mean to put things right, we can't wait much longer.

Unsatisfied with having rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English style, they proceeded to shoot the legs out from under grammar--which collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional.

Our ability to write and read good, clear English connects us to one another and to our common past. The prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise. Shakespeare's most perfect phrases are miraculously simple and terse. ("Thou art the thing itself." "A plague o' both your houses." "Can one desire too much of a good thing?") The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written "pure simple English." Meanwhile, in everyday prose, a word with useless syllables or a sentence with useless words is a house fancied-up with fake dormers and chimneys. It is ugly and boring and cheap, and impossible to take seriously.

But our problem goes deeper than a few silly words and many tedious sentences. How can I (how can any teacher) get students to take the prime rule seriously when virtually the whole educational establishment teaches the opposite? When students have been ordered since first grade to put "he or she" in spots where "he" would mean exactly the same thing, and "firefighter" where "fireman" would mean exactly the same thing? How can we then tell them, "Make every word, every syllable count!" They may be ignorant but they're not stupid. The well-aimed torpedo of Feminist English has sunk the whole process of teaching students to write. The small minority of born writers will always get by, inventing their own rules as they go. But we used to expect every educated citizen to write decently--and that goal is out the window.

"He or she" is the proud marshal of this pathetic parade. It has generated a cascading series of problems in which the Establishment, having noticed that Officially Approved gender-neutral sentences sound rotten, has dreamt up alternatives that are even worse. So let's consider "he or she." In some cases the awfulness of a feminist phrase requires several paragraphs to investigate systematically. Such investigations are worth pursuing nonetheless; our language is at stake.

When the style-smashers first announced, decades ago, that the neutral "he" meant "male" and excluded "female," they were lying and knew it. After all, when a critic like Mary Lascelles writes (in her classic 1939 study of Jane Austen) that "no reader can vouch for more than his own experience," one can hardly accuse her of envisioning male readers only. In feminist minds ideology excused the lie, and the goal of interchangeable sexes was a far greater good than decent English. Even today's English professors have heard (I suppose) of Eudora Welty, who wrote in her 1984 memoirs--just as the feminist anti-English campaign was nearing total victory--that every story writer imagines himself inside his characters; "it is his first step, and his last too." Was the author demonstrating her inability to write proper English? Or merely letting us know that there is no such thing as a female writer?

E.B. White was our greatest modern source of the purest, freshest, clearest, most bracing English, straight from a magic spring that bubbled for him alone. With A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, he was one of a triumvirate that made the New Yorker under its great editor Harold Ross a thing of beauty and a joy forever. The Elements of Style, White's revision of a short textbook by his Cornell professor William Strunk, is justly revered as the best thing of its kind. In the third edition (1979), White lays down the law on the he-or-she epidemic that was sweeping the country like a bad flu (or a bad joke).

The use of he as a pronoun for nouns embracing both genders is a simple, practical convention rooted in the beginnings of the English language. He has lost all suggestion of maleness in these circumstances. The word was unquestionably biased to begin with (the dominant male), but after hundreds of years it has become seemingly indispensable. It has no pejorative connotations; it is never incorrect.

(Warning: White died in 1985; a later edition of Elements published after his death is a disgrace to his memory.) In his 1984 White biography, Scott Elledge tells a remarkable story about "he or she": The New Yorker rejected [in 1971] a parable White had written about the campaign of feminists to abolish the use of the pronoun his to mean "his or her." He told Roger Angell [his wife's son by a previous marriage] that he was "surprised, but not downhearted, that the piece got sunk. To me, any woman's (or man's) attempt to remove the gender from the language is both funny and futile."

For the New Yorker to have rejected a piece by White, its darling and its hero, the man who did more than anyone but Ross himself to make the magazine the runaway, roaring success it became, and (by the way) a thorough-going liberal, was a sure sign that feminism had already got America in a chokehold.

The fixed idea forced by language rapists upon a whole generation of students, that "he" can refer only to a male, is (in short) wrong. It is applied with nonsensical inconsistency, too. The same feminist warriors who would never write "he" where "he or she" will do would also never write "the author or authoress" where "the author" will do. They hate such words as actress and waitress; in these cases they insist that the masculine form be used for men and women. You would never find my feminist colleagues writing a phrase such as, "When an Anglican priest or priestess mounts the pulpit." You will find them writing, "When an Anglican priest mounts the pulpit, he or she is about to address the congregation." Logic has never been a strong suit among the commissar-intellectuals who have bossed American culture since the 1970s. True, "he" sounds explicitly masculine in a way "priest" doesn't, to those who are just learning the language. Children also find it odd that "enough" should be spelled that way, that New York should be at the same latitude as Spain, that 7 squared is 49, and so on. Education was invented to set people
straight on all these fine points.

He-or-she'ing added so much ugly dead weight to the language that even the Establishment couldn't help noticing. So feminist authorities went back to the drawing board. Unsatisfied with having rammed their 80-ton 16-wheeler into the nimble sports-car of English style, they proceeded to shoot the legs out from under grammar--which collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional. "When an Anglican priest mounts the pulpit, they are about to address the congregation." How many of today's high school English teachers would mark this sentence wrong, or even "awkward"? (Show of hands? Not one?) Yet such sentences skreak like fingernails on a blackboard.

Slashes are just as bad. He/she is about to address the congregation" is unacceptable because it's not clear how to pronounce it: "he she," "he or she," "he slash she"? The unclarity is a nuisance, and each possibility sounds awful. Writing English is like writing music: One lays down the footprints of sounds that are recreated in each reader's mind. To be deaf to English is like being deaf to birdsong or laughter or rustling trees or babbling brooks--only worse, because English is the communal, emotional, and intellectual net that holds this nation together, if anything can. Occasionally one sees "s/he," which shows not indifference but outright contempt for the language and the reader.

And it gets worse. At the bottom of this junkpile is a maneuver that seems to be growing in popularity, at least among college students: writing "she" instead of neutral "he," or interchanging "he" and "she" at random. This grotesque outcome follows naturally from the primordial lie. If you make students believe that "he" can refer only to a male, then writers who use "he" in sentences referring to men and women are actually discussing males only and excluding females--and might just as well use "she" and exclude males, leaving the reader to sort things out for himself. The she-sentences that result tend to slam on a reader's brakes and send him smash-and-spinning into the roadside underbrush, cursing under his breath. (I still remember the first time I encountered such a sentence, in an early-1980s book by a noted historian about a Jesuit in Asia.)

Here is the problem with the dreaded she-sentence. Ideologues can lie themselves blue in the face without changing the fact that, to those who know modern English as it existed until the cultural revolution and still does exist in many quarters, the neutral he "has lost all suggestion of maleness." But there is no such thing as a neutral "she"; even feminists don't claim there is.
"The driver turns on his headlights" is not about a male or female person; it is about a driving person. But "the driver turns on her headlights" is a sentence about a female driver. Just as any competent reader listens to what he is reading, he pictures it too (if it can be pictured); hearing and imagining the written word are ingrained habits. A reader who had thought the topic was drivers is now faced by a specifically female driver, and naturally wonders why. What is the writer getting at? To distract your reader for political purposes, to trip him up merely to demonstrate your praiseworthy right-thinkingness, is a low trick.

White's comment: "If you think she is a handy substitute for he, try it and see what happens."
Sometimes a writer can avoid plastering his prose with feminist bumper-stickers and still not provoke the running dogs of the Establishment by diving into the plural whenever danger threatens. ("Drivers turn on their headlights.") White's comment: Alternatively, put all controversial nouns in the plural and avoid the choice of sex altogether, and you may find your prose sounding general and diffuse as a result.

But the real problem goes deeper. Why should I worry about feminist ideology while I write? Why should I worry about anyone's ideology? Writing is a tricky business that requires one's whole concentration, as any professional will tell you; as no doubt you know anyway. Who can afford to allow a virtual feminist to elbow her way like a noisy drunk into that inner mental circle where all your faculties (such as they are) are laboring to produce decent prose? Bargaining over the next word, shaping each phrase, netting and vetting the countless images that drift through the mind like butterflies in a summer garden, mounting some and releasing others--and keeping the trajectory and target always in mind?

Throw the bum out.

It's a disgrace that we graduate class after class of young Americans who will never be able to write down their thoughts effectively--in a business report, a letter of application or recommendation, a postcard or email, or any other form. Our one consolation is that the country is filling up gradually with people who have been reared on ugly, childish writing and will never expect anything else. But the implications of our spineless surrender go deeper. We have accepted, implicitly, a hit-and-run vandalizing of English--the richest, most expressive language in the world. Languages such as French are shaped and guided by official boards of big shots. But English used to be a language of the people, by the people, for the people. "The living language is like a cowpath," wrote White; "it is the creation of the cows themselves, who, having created it, follow it or depart from it according to their whims or their needs." We have allowed our academic overlords to plow up White's cow-path and replace it with a steel-and-concrete highway, hemmed in by guardrails and heavily patrolled by police.

Of course all languages change. A feminist might say that he-or-she is merely the latest twist in our ever-changing cowpath; that he-or-she was the will of the people. But this too is a lie, and in fairness to my opponents I have never heard them deploy it. They know that Americans of the late 1960s were not struck en masse by sudden unhappiness over the neutral he or the word "chairman." Such complaints never did rank high on the average American's list of worries. (Way back in the 1970s, "chairperson" was in fact a one-word joke: an object lesson in the ludicrous places you would reach if you took Feminist English seriously.) In fact the New English was deliberately created and pounded into children's heads by an intellectual elite asserting its control over American culture. The same conclusion follows independently from a language's well-established tendency to simplify and compress its existing structure (like a settling sea-bed) to make room for constantly arriving new coinages. Words like "authoress" would almost certainly have disappeared with no help from feminists. But "he" transforming itself into "he or she" is like a ball rolling uphill. It doesn't happen unless someone has volunteered to push.

The depressing trail continues one last mile. What happens to a nation's thinking when you ban such phrases as "great men"? The alternatives are so bad--"great person" sounds silly; "great human being" is a casual tribute to a friend--that it's hard to know where to turn. "Hero" doesn't work; "Wittgenstein was a great man" is a self-sufficient assertion, but "Wittgenstein was a hero" is not. Was he a war hero, a philosophical hero? (Yes and yes.) "Wittgenstein was a great heart" (also true) can't be rephrased in hero-speak, and can't substitute for "great man" either.
We happen to know also that the idea of "great men" has been bounced right out of education at every level. Nowadays students are taught to admire celebrities and money instead. We might well have misplaced the "great man" idea anyway, but losing the phrase didn't help. Civilization copes poorly with ideas that have no names.

And what should we say instead of "brotherhood"? "Crown thy good with siblinghood"? "Tolerance" is no substitute for "brotherhood"; it's passive and bland where "brotherhood" is active and inspiring. "Brotherhood" has accordingly been quietly stricken from the list of good things to which Americans should aspire.

We allowed ideologues to wreck the English language. Do we have the courage to rebuild?

David Gelernter is a national fellow at AEI. Their address is:

http://www.aei.org/default.asp?filter=all

The Catholic Knight: Latin's Rebirth

2008-02-22T16:50:00.000-06:00

Latin is having a remarkable rebirth. Not only is the number of students learning Latin seeing incredible growth, there is also a growing move to make it the 'official' language of the EU. Given the number of languages in use in the European Union, the cost of translation of each document into each of the EU's working languages, this movement certainly makes sense. The link below is to an article that follows the increasing use of Latin.

The Catholic Knight: Latin's Rebirth

The Belmont Club: Kosovo's Independence

2008-02-21T14:33:00.000-06:00

Current Events... one wonders why our government is getting involved in what is an internal Serbian matter? The Belmont Club Blog offers interesting insight into this important matter.

Barry R McCain

The Belmont Club: Kosovo's Independence

If You Have Sons...

2008-02-18T12:32:00.000-06:00

An important new book out that addresses an alarming reality concerning boys and young men in our society.

There is a steady decline of performance, ambition, and fertility of American boys and young men. Sperm counts and testosterone levels of young men have declined substantially over the last 50 years. One researcher, Dr Leonard Sax, thinks this trend is linked in part to environmental estrogens to which boys and young men are exposed. One of the main sources of these estrogens is plastic bottled drinks. According to Dr Sax two plastic bottles of water has the same amount of estrogen as found in a birth control pill. Elevated estrogen levels are thought to be a key factor in lowering testosterone levels in men. The lower testosterone levels create boys and young men that have no motivation.

The anti-male bias so prevalent in modern society only reinforces this decline of motivation, performance and ambition. Dr Sax also believes that the education system ignores important gender differences and creates an academic environment hostile to boys. In public schools games and activities that have element of contact, such as dodge ball, are not allowed. These activities are seen a ‘male’ and undesirable, boys encouraged to be more like girls. If a boy acts like a boy, he is often treated with behaviour medications.

Boys grow into young men that are unmotivated to pursue academic goals, and these boys and young men create and live in a virtual world, filled with video games and pornography that is more important to them than the real world. Dr Lenorad Sax current book is Boys Adrift, available at most bookstores and via the internet.

Dr Lenorad Sax’s web site address is:

http://www.boysadrift.com/home.php

French President Sarkozy and Our Christian Roots

2008-02-02T10:01:00.000-06:00

1-February-2008 -- Catholic World News Brief

French President Acknowledges Europe's Christian Heritage

Paris, Jan. 31, 2008 (CWNews.com) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoke out in support of recognizing "the Christian roots of Europe." At a meeting of his political party, the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, Sarkozy said that leaders of the European Union were wrong to exclude an explicit reference to Christianity from the language of the proposed EU constitutional treaty. (The French voters rejected that treaty in a 2005 referendum.)

"We erred when we turned our back on the past, and in a certain sense turned our back on our roots, which are obvious," Sarkozy said. Echoing the argument that has been advanced by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the French leader said that without a basis in Christian culture, the European Union will have no firm foundation.

"If we reject our past, we are not ready for our future," Sarkozy said.

First Issue this month...

2008-02-01T07:19:00.000-06:00

First issue will come out in February, please visit us again in a couple of weeks.

Barry R McCain