We are taking a blogging-break for Lent, and we’ll be back on April 8th.

My husband participates in an online “conversation” that makes ours here at Traditional Christianity appear restrained and uber sophisticated.  What men who love guns will put up with is a lot, apparently, and so it is with this group of firearms geeks, and because the right enumerated in the second amendment of the US Constitution is so entwined with politics, politics frequently becomes its own thread, and down the rabbit hole they go.

A woman participant displayed recently what I believe to be the definition of self-determined self-destruction:  she cannot understand that her love for self-preservation by firearm is at odds with her insistence that chemical birth control is not only her right, but is beneficial to her well being.

At the risk of being overly simplistic, let’s (albeit unfairly, she’s not here) examine her argument and see where she goes wrong:

1)  she smells funny, and is therefore less likely to accurately choose a/be chosen as a compatible partner

2) she subconsciously conflates chemical birth control with “safe sex” and is more likely to contract disease

3) she subconsciously believes that merely not becoming pregnant will preserve her desirability to a future potential ltr/husband

4) she has been sold, criminally, if you ask me, the lie that chemical birth control is not physically harmful to women

5) she has been sold, criminally, if you ask me, the lie that chemical birth control is not physically harmful to men

6) she has been schooled well in the propaganda of Social Darwinism, yet fails to see how that rules her unfit

7) she elects to poison herself and advocates poison for her “sisters”, and accuses a certain Presidential Candidate of Whom We Will Not Speak of hating women and running for Pope rather than President.

Well, dear, here’s the thing:  if we were not Christians, if we were not Catholic, we would buy you the chemical birth control all day long.  Because we are, we will not. You have been alleged to be more than a sum of yer parts. How pathetic is it that in the era of self-esteem, we esteem you more highly than you do yourself?

Who loves ya, baby?

links worth reading:

http://gerardnadal.com/2012/02/16/breast-cancer-risk-from-oral-contraceptive-use-prior-to-first-birth/

http://gerardnadal.com/2012/02/15/world-health-organization-data-on-birth-control-pill-and-estrogen-replacement-carcinogenicity/

Sixty-four percent of wives report being very happy when they and their husbands attend church (or synagogue or temple) regularly, compared to about 50 percent of wives in a marriage where only one spouse goes to church (or neither spouse does). Wives in marriages where both spouses go to church regularly are also only about one-third as likely to report their marriage is at risk of divorce. (Husbands in these marriages are only one-quarter as likely to report thinking of divorce). Seventy-seven percent of wives in marriage where both husband and wife believe “God is at the center of my marriage” report being very happy, and just 1 percent of such wives report feeling their marriages may end in divorce.

Why are these wives so happy? Is it just an illusion? The authors of the report say that, in part, religious practice and beliefs make men better husbands.

…

“We found that pronatalistic attitude is one of the top five predictors of marital happiness” for both wives and for husbands, the authors state.

In the lace curtain media, a frequent lament is “where have all the good men gone?”. Likewise, in the manosphere, it seems that nearly all men have written off Western women as too spoilt by feminism to be wives. Both groups miss the mark, the former for failing to recognize their hypergamically limited “erotic field of regard”, the latter for observing that a fiercely gynocentric culture + MWALT == “why bother?”.

If there is one thing this article suggests, is that we can select ourselves for marital happiness. While a quiverfull may indeed happen by accident in this day and age (low probability in our anti-natalist/contraceptive / abortifacient culture), a zealous faith doesn’t. We can choose to set ourselves up for success. We can select ourselves into the population most likely to enjoy marital happiness, not because we sought happiness for happiness’ sake, but because we loved God and He blessed us in response.

From Business Insider:

Lin told New York Post writer Steve Serby today that he is in fact single and described his ideal girlfriend (via NY Mag):

“First she would really love God and be a faithful Christian, and then after that, I think, a desire to serve other people, to help with the underprivileged, do a lot of social work . . . great personality and easy to be around. Someone that’s definitely chill, low key, low maintenance.”

Linning!

America is the birthplace of the Eugenics, and it appears to be a mentality that was never completely eliminated. Scarily-enough, we’re watching it rise again all over the country. From the human biodiversity (HBD) movement, to federally-financed abortions, to the forced sterilization of the disabled, to the legalization of suicide, to the reign of CPS terror, to political attacks on pro-life institutions like the RCC, to the rabid promotion of contraception for the underclass and other “undesirables”, to, to, to… I’m starting to feel like I’ve been transported back to Nazi Germany.

From the Detroit News:

Michigan is breeding poverty

Since the national attention is on birth control, here’s my idea: If we want to fight poverty, reduce violent crime and bring down our embarrassing drop-out rate, we should swap contraceptives for fluoride in Michigan’s drinking water.

We’ve got a baby problem in Michigan. Too many babies are born to immature parents who don’t have the skills to raise them, too many are delivered by poor women who can’t afford them, and too many are fathered by sorry layabouts who spread their seed like dandelions and then wander away from the consequences.

Michigan’s social problems and the huge costs attached to them won’t recede until we embrace reproductive responsibility.

Reproductive responsibility means that they take over responsibility for your reproduction. I’m surprised he didn’t suggest we simply eat the babies or make them into kid gloves.

It’s a brave new world out there, and the imperfect and unwanted have no place in it. It all sounds very reasonable at first, as utilitarianism is always reasonable, but add it all together and you can see the new humanist tyranny unfolding in our nation. We are on the slippery slope of the Culture of Death, and there’s nowhere to go from here but down.

Sometimes you just don’t know how much you don’t know about a subject until you do a little research.  Housecleaning seems like a simple enough topic that one might not even be inclined to do any research.  This is what I thought for about 10 years but then I wondered “if housecleaning is so easy why is my house not cleaner?”  I started to do some searching around for strategies and solutions and that is when I came across this book.  The author owned a residential cleaning company and here she explains how to clean a house efficiently and effectively.  Some of the things she explained how to clean were things I had not even thought to clean.

What this book is not- it is not about decluttering, or tidying, or a moralistic tale on why you should be cleaner.  It is just the basic how-to’s of nitty gritty deep down cleaning of a house.  She gives you a supply list (that is surprisingly short) and a methodology so that you never retrace your steps or have to wonder where you left off.

So why did I review this book for Traditional Christianity?  Because Lent is almost here and it is a great time to do some cleaning house..spiritually and practically.

Elspeth:

Saturday- Date night (kids cook, kids choice)

Sunday- Lasagna, Caesar salad

Monday-Chili, corn bread

Tuesday- Chicken and rice casserole, asparagus

Wednesday- Steak fajitas

Thursday-minestrone, salad, garlic bread sticks

Friday- mushroom Swiss burgers

Alte:

Monday – Bratwurst with mashed potatoes and Brussels sprouts

Tuesday – Spaghetti bolognese, salad

(Ash) Wednesday – Italian salad with sardines, corn chowder

Thursday – Oven-fried chicken with corn flakes, tomato-cucumber salad

(Day of abstinence) Friday – Bean stew, salt potatoes

Saturday – Ham roast with mustard-maple glaze, fried polenta, steamed spinach

Sunday — Pot roast with dark beer sauce, red cabbage, potato dumplings

Good post from ZeroHedge: When Debt Is More Important Than People, The System Is Evil

What’s lost in this subtext is the responsibility of the lender. Yes, nobody forced Greece to borrow 200 billion euros (or whatever the true total may be), but then nobody forced the lenders to extend the credit in the first place.

Consider an individual who is a visibly poor credit risk. He would like to borrow money to blow on consumption and then stiff the lender, but since he cannot create credit, he has to live within his means.

Now a lender comes along who can create credit out of thin air (via fractional reserve banking) and offers this poor credit risk $100,000 in collateral-free debt at low rates of interest. Who is responsible for the creation and extension of credit? The borrower or the lender? Answer: the lender.

In other words, if the lender is foolish enough to extend huge quantities of credit to a poor credit risk, then it’s the lender who should suffer the losses when the borrower defaults.

This is the basis of bankruptcy laws–or used to be the basis.

Finally, since the hero stretches our minds and hearts by being so strikingly different from the rest of us, teach your children to hate and suspect excellence. This you can do in two ways.

You can attack excellence itself; a risky enterprise, since if you are going to bring the heroic genius of Michelangelo down to the level , of, say , special effects in video games, you actually have to show your children the work of Michelangelo. One never knows what might happen then.

The opposite strategy seems surer. You call anything and everything excellent. You democratize heroism. Everybody is a hero, and simply for doing (and often not well at that) the ordinary tasks of living as a half-decent person. Does your mother fix your breakfast? She is a hero. Does your father visit you every weekend without fail? A hero. Does your teacher mark your papers faithfully when you make a mistake? Unexampled heroism, that. If everyone is a hero, no one is a hero; and genuine heroes will go unnoticed in all the mindless self-congratulation. (page 147)

Mindless self-congratulation is the perfect description of the society in which we live; one where people expect adulation for doing what they are supposed to do. Or worse, for doing the job they are paid to do.

So no, teachers are not heroes. They are paid to show up every day, teach students, grade papers, and field unruly kids. Yes, the job is challenging but they know this when they sign up for it. Given that they work 9 months out of the year, have summers, weekends, and holidays off, I fail to see how they are any more heroic than the waitress who deals with rude parents and unruly kids for an uncertain payoff. Or even compared to the checker at Wal-mart who has to deal with a level of human insolence and abuse that rivals anything a teacher does for a fraction of the pay. I’m not knocking teachers, should any be reading along. I’m simply attempting to inject some sanity and realism into the meme of teachers as unsung heroes.

Mothers are not heroes, not even single mothers. Once our  babies are inside of us, they have to come out. When they do, it is natural and expected that we are to care for them to the best of our ability. Motherhood is not inflicted upon us. We choose it, and we choose the circumstances under which we embark on it. There’s nothing inherently heroic about motherhood. Our grandmothers knew that.

People who survive horrific accidents or crimes are not heroes simply because they survived. They were fortunate, but not heroic. While I recognize that it takes intestinal fortitude to do the hard work of regaining some semblance of a normal life, it’s not as if they have a choice. Media representation of an accident or crime victim’s “heroic” journey to wholeness further detract from the truly heroic acts that are by definition rare and by our watered down definition of heroism, increasingly ignored.

This may be controversial, but police officers are not heroes either. People who perform high-risk jobs are not heroes simply because they perform high-risk jobs. The idea that police officers protect and serve is a bit misleading since they usually don’t show up until the calamity and carnage has already taken place.

Fathers who guide and provide for their families are not heroes, though in the current culture a man who can manage to raise his children to adulthood while maintaining the respect of his wife and children has certainly completed a feat that puts him in an elite category among men.

Heroes are those who demonstrate uncommon valor and nobility, not those who wake up every morning and do what they are supposed to do. When every kid gets a trophy, there are no winners and losers and every small act of decency is something to be applauded, it’s clear how far we’ve descended as a culture.