Cynthia Toney's "Bird Face" Series

 I bought 8 Notes to a Nobody book for my daughter and she loved it so much I had to read it myself. I was immediately swept into the drama of a young adolescent from a broken home, dealing with a healing parent and all the ups and downs of school. I was reminded of a recent art exhibit of street scenes from small towns and how the artist, through his use of color and brush strokes, made the ordinary appear extraordinary. Similarly, it requires a skilled writer to take what is basically a simple story from every day life and plunge the reader into the quiet tragedies and triumphs of the characters, not unlike those that are being played out all around us. Making a story which is equally appealing to young people as well as to adults is another gift as well. The heroine of 8 Notes to a Nobody is Wendy, who is struggling with the unhappiness of her home life. I found myself identifying with her mother who is trying so hard to build a life for her child on a limited income. And yet by the end of the story I realized that Wendy's comparative poverty not only spurs her creativity but protects her from many of the pressures of the lavish lifestyles of her peers. She gradually sees that those who appear to have everything also struggle with insecurities. I also enjoyed the setting of Louisiana and the cultural environment unlike any other.

Having loved the first book, I dived immediately into the sequel, 10 Steps to Girlfriend Status. Wendy, our heroine, is now fourteen and everything seems to have come together for her. Not only does the boy she likes seem serious about her, but suddenly there is another boy who is interested as well. Her mother has married again; Wendy's life has several new levels of complexity. Plus her dear little old lady friend is showing signs of dementia. In the midst of it all, Wendy has become aware of a long lost uncle who was involved in a scandal which no one speaks of. Determined to discover the truth, Wendy unravels the mystery and in doing so helps herself to face the problems of the present time. Like the 8 Notes, the second novel deals with contemporary teenage issues in a southern setting, adding a rich flavor to the story.

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Planned Parenthood Fears Trump

From Life News:

As LifeNews reported, in a new letter outlining pro-life policy specifics, Donald Trump announced support for defunding the Planned Parenthood abortion business if it does not stop killing unborn children in abortion. Since the abortion corporation has no intention of doing so, Trump believes federal taxpayer dollars should not flow to it.

Trump has issued a call to make permanent the Hyde Amendment that bans almost all federal taxpayer funding of abortions and is credited with saving the lives of over 1 million Americans from abortion. In that call is also a request for defunding Planned Parenthood — which stands in stark contrast to the essentially joint campaign Hillary Clinton and the abortion corporation are running for president. Planned Parenthood’s CEO is crisscrossing the country for Clinton and has put up $20 million for her.

The call for defunding Planned Parenthood comes in a new letter from Trump.

“Hillary Clinton’s unwavering commitment to advancing taxpayer-funded abortion on-demand stands in stark contrast to the commitments I’ve made to advance the rights of unborn children and their mothers when elected president. I am committed to defunding Planned Parenthood as long as they continue to perform abortions and reallocating their funding to community health centers that provide comprehensive health care for women,” Trump says.

In the new email to its supporters, Dawn Laguens, Executive Vice President of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, complained: “The days of public funding for Planned Parenthood are over when the Trump-Pence administration arrives in Washington, DC.”

“That’s Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, speaking recently to one of the largest gatherings of anti-abortion extremists in the country. What was he doing there? Arrogantly promising to block federal support for the vital services Planned Parenthood health centers provide for millions of Americans,” she said.

Laguens calls for an emergency donation from Planed Parenthood members, according to the email LifeNews received, saying that defunding Planned Parenthood “is just one of the Trump-Pence priorities if they win the White House.” (Read more.)

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Mail Order Brides of Jamestown

From The Atlantic:

“First comes love, then comes marriage,” the old nursery rhyme goes, but historically, first came money. Marriage was above all an economic transaction, and in no place was this more apparent than in the early 1600s in the Jamestown colony, where a severe gender imbalance threatened the fledgling colony’s future.

The men of Jamestown desperately wanted wives, but women were refusing to immigrate. They had heard disturbing reports of dissension, famine, and disease, and had decided it simply wasn’t worth it. Consequently, barely a decade after its founding in 1607, Jamestown was almost entirely male, and because these men were unable to find wives, they were deserting the colony in droves.

An immediate influx of women was needed to save the floundering colony; its leaders suggested putting out an advertisement targeting wives. The women who responded to this marital request and agreed to marry unknown men in an unfamiliar land were in a sense America’s first mail-order brides. (Read more.)

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The Farming Life in Old Virginia

From my little sister's blog:

The Brackens learned much of what they know from Joel Salatin, while training on his farm, as well as from neighbors and friends who offer constant support and guidance on matters as they arise. When you sign on to farm, you sign on for anything and everything. There is no denial about what you put into your body anymore. There is simply seeing life from beginning to end, from soil to plate; through the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Brackens exhibit something I search for everyday in my life, and that is bravery. They gave up what they knew to start over in search of a more truthful and natural existence. We always try to do, do, do. More, more, more. Come up with the answers and force our lives into some sort of mold. But what if we listened more? What could happen?

You can find the Brackens at both the Abingdon and Wytheville Farmer’s Markets, as well as contact them through their website. Below is a bit of our conversation while riding in the back of their red pick-up to visit animals, eat fresh corn, and overlook the mountains from high, high on a hill. I was in need of fresh air and a fresh perspective that particular day, and both presented themselves. (Read more.)

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The Rocks of Madness

From Crisis:

Thus is the brave new world in which we live, the fruit of the tragic 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act, permitting certain in-vitro fertilization practices in Canada: Unlike our neighbors to the south, we cannot buy or sell sperm or eggs, but we can use them. A number of Catholics supported the Bill back then, as at least prohibiting some of the worst evils. However, contrary, I would argue, to Pope John Paul II’s teaching in paragraphs 73-74 of Evangelium Vitae, we introduced into positive law some other grave evils, as we see in the case of the prolific Aggeles who, it seems, will not be charged, as not compos mentis enough to understand what he was doing....

Recall the host of evils that arise from this practice: children who know not their fathers, nor their (surrogate) mothers; multiple siblings who know not they are siblings; lack of genetic diversity;  technological manipulation and control of human reproduction. And perhaps the most disturbing: thousands, if not millions, of non-transferred embryos left in cold storage, left to what the Church has called an “absurd” fate, likely eventual death, as they are abandoned and forgotten. For a Magisterial and theological take, see the trivium of documents:  Humanae Vitae (1968), Donum Vitae (1987) and Dignitatis Personae (2008) all well worth a read.

Thus is the Promethean Age of Man, or, in this case, Woman: If Woman wants a child, and has no Man, then a child must be given her, in a twisted parody of Luke’s Gospel, where a Woman conceives of the Holy Spirit, without a Man. And, lest we forget, this Woman had the help and support of one of the greatest of Men, Saint Joseph.

I keep hoping we might return to some sort of sanity and reason in our world, but, ten years after Benedict XVI’s crisp, clear, and direct Regensburg Address calling for such a return, my hopes keep getting dashed on the rocks of madness. An article this morning announced that they now may be able to use sperm alone to fertilize “any cell of the body.” Hence, we may soon have children without mothers, along with children without fathers. All you men out there, we may even be able to conceive our own children, quite literally ourselves, in a bizarre twist to cloning, the ultimate vanitas vanitatis. (Read more.)

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Green Martyrdom

From Mark Fisher:

As Thomas Cahill tells us, with the introduction of Christianity, many new Christians looked for a kind of “green martyrdom”. Denied the red martyrdom of death by blood, they looked to become a living sacrifice for Christ—to become “a green martyr”. Their willingness is explainable when we understand that within the Irish character are strains of melancholy mixed with wild abandon. (Ah hah, is that where I get it from?) As G.K. Chesterton once said,

For the great Gaels of Ireland,
Are the men that God made mad.
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.

In a previous post we talked about how Celtic women sometimes sought celibacy as a way to dedicate their lives to Christ. Sometimes, they even banded together into communities of virgins. The same was true of men. And when they joined a monastery, they became part of a community of learning and scholarship. The monasteries began with the intent to live in isolation—witness the number of beehive stone huts scattered throughout the Emerald Isle. But these huts, big enough for only a single individual, ended up being clustered in communities of monks. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette as the Goddess of Love and Beauty

Here we have a painting of Marie-Antoinette as Venus with a dolphin, probably to celebrate the Dauphin's birth in 1781. Below is a depiction in marble of the Queen as Venus, with the infant Cupid representing the Dauphin.

Allegory of Marie-Antoinette as Venus with Cupid by Pajou

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Hillary the Liar

How could a nation become so perverse that it would tolerate as a candidate for President of the United States, a candidate from a major political party, a woman who lies about everything, who lies when she does not even have to, who obviously can no longer discern truth from falsehood? Not only has Hillary Clinton shown herself to be careless with national security, but she has shown herself to be completely untrustworthy and unreliable while holding public office. Furthermore, anyone with her poor health should have the decency to let a younger and more vigorous person run in her place. From The Washington Post:

She lied repeatedly about her emails. She lied when she said she had “turned over everything I was obligated to turn over” (FBI Director James Comey said the FBI “discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not among the group of 30,000 e-mails returned by Secretary Clinton to state in 2014”). She lied when she said there was “no classified material” in her private emails . . . that there was nothing “classified at the time” . . . and that there was nothing “marked classified” in her private emails — all of which the FBI director said were untrue. And, to top it all off, she lied about her lies — declaring on national television that “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people” — a claim The Post’s Fact Checker gave “Four Pinocchios.”

Clinton lied to the American people about Benghazi. At 10:08 p.m. the night of the attack, she issued a statement that blamed the attack on “inflammatory material posted on the Internet” with no mention of terrorism or al-Qaeda. But an hour later, at 11:12 p.m. she emailed her daughter, Chelsea: “Two of our officers were killed in Benghazi by an Al Queda-like [sic] group.” The next day in a phone call with the Egyptian prime minister, Clinton said: “We know the attack in Libya had nothing to do with the film. It was a planned attack, not a protest.” Yet two days later, as she welcomed the caskets of the fallen in Dover, Del., she blamed that attack on “an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

She lied about a trip she made to Bosnia, claiming that she and her team arrived “under sniper fire,” skipped the arrival ceremony and “just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.” In fact, a video shows her being greeted on the tarmac by Bosnian officials and an 8-year-old Muslim girl, Emina Bicakcic, who read a poem in English and told Clinton, “There is peace now.”

She lied about her family history. In 2015, she said she could relate to illegal immigrants because “all my grandparents” immigrated to the United States. When BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski pointed out that three of Clinton’s four grandparents were born in the United States, a Clinton spokesman said “her grandparents always spoke about the immigrant experience and, as a result she has always thought of them as immigrants.”

And her dishonesty stretches back decades. As the late, great William Safire pointed out in a 1996 New York Times column, she delivered a “blizzard of lies” as first lady — about Whitewater, the firing of White House travel aides, her representation of a criminal enterprise known as the Madison S&L and how she made a 10,000 percent profit in 1979 commodity trading simply by studying the Wall Street Journal. Even back then, Safire concluded, Clinton was “a congenital liar.”

Today, the American people agree. A recent NBC News poll found that just 11 percent of Americans say Clinton is honest and trustworthy. To put that in perspective, 14 percent of American voters believe in Bigfoot. In other words, more Americans believe that a large, hairy, hominoid creature inhabits the forest of North America than believe that Hillary Clinton tells the truth. So if Clinton wonders why so many believe she is lying about her health, it is because she has lied so many times, about so many things, that most Americans no longer believe a word she says — even if she’s telling the truth. (Read more.)

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Getting Rid of Stuff

From The Balanced Life:

I went into the playroom – the room that was the bane of my existence. This was a room full of colorful bins, each bin full of toys. There were toys on the floor, in chests, in boxes, toys everywhere. I would send my kids in here to play and they would come out less than ten minutes later complaining of boredom. This room was pointless, and I’d had enough. 

I started working through the room, making piles – keep, trash, donate. I got rid of every single toy that I felt wasn’t benefiting my kids. If it didn’t cause them to engage in constructive or imaginary play, it wasn’t staying in this house because it wasn’t worth the work it caused me. If I was going to clean up it was going to be the things that added to our lives; it was going to be only the things we needed and the things we truly loved. 

When I was finished, all that remained were trains and tracks, a couple of dress up costumes, books, and blocks. The trunk of my car was overstuffed with toys to take to Goodwill, my playroom was purged, and I immediately felt lighter. 

The next day my kids ran downstairs for breakfast, and as usual, I sent them into their playroom to play, curious to see if meltdowns would ensue because of what I’d done with their toys. They walked in, looked around, said something along the lines of “Hey! It’s nice and clean, Mommy! Hey! There’s my trains!” and happily started playing. (Read more.)

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