Tidy and Sloppy Neighbors, June 1, 1961, Saturday Evening Post. Illustration by John Falter

KYLE writes:

I recently drove through my old neighborhood on the way home one evening and noticed that a plurality of the houses my childhood friends grew up in, homes built in the 1970s, haven’t aged gracefully. Most of the aesthetic ornamentation of these houses has become blackened from dirt and brake dust. Window shutters, glass panes, aluminum siding, gutters, entry sidewalks, and garage doors are long overdue for a good pressure washing. Wooden deck patios are a good shove away from falling down. Flowerbeds are barren from being washed out by clogged gutters that flood the bed below and wash out the mulch. Often times garden beds are clogged with dried up leaves from the previous autumn.

Large weeds are often indistinguishable from the plants next to them. The concrete driveways we played basketball on now feature a multitude of spider-web-like cracks and in some cases, they’ve damn near been pulverized to gravel. The streets are riddled with erosion from salt that city workers pound on it during winter months. The same streets are soiled from the engine oil of parked vehicles, giving the neighborhood streets the seedy look of a Wal-Mart parking lot. Read More »

FROM Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism, a forthcoming book from VDare Books by the late Lawrence Auster:

We do not resist, and in most cases do not even notice, the desacralizations that surround us because they constitute the very fabric of our culture. Every culture has an organizing idea that is expressed, consciously or unconsciously, in every facet of its physical and social environment. Just as the organizing idea of medieval Europe was Christianity, and the organizing idea of nineteenth century America was democracy, so the organizing idea of our present, multicultural society is nihilism.

To characterize modern society as nihilistic may strike the reader as extreme. Nihilism is conventionally thought of as an attitude of total negation, as “a rage against creation and against civilization that will not be appeased until it has reduced them to absolute nothingness.” [Eugene Rose, Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age, Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, Forestville, CA, 1994]. What does this frightful will to destruction have to do with our happy-go-lucky, prosperous, fun-loving country? The answer is that there are degrees and stages of nihilism short of the extreme kind described above. As Fr. Seraphim Rose writes, nihilism is entirely compatible with a “positive” attitude toward life, with enthusiasm, goals, self-esteem, creativity, and most of all with a sense of limitless freedom. What defines nihilism in all its variations is not an attitude of total negation toward everything (which, as we have said, is only the most extreme form of nihilism), but the belief that there is no absolute truth and no rational basis for determining right and wrong. In its early stages, nihilism simply denies the existence of moral truth. In its advanced stages, nihilism replaces moral truth by a new, non-moral criterion of human action–such as “power,” “vitality,” “self-fulfillment,” or “prosperity.” Read More »

LAST MONTH, when I was away from home and not following the story, Catholic League President Bill Donohue, PH.D., wrote of the mind-blowing injustice of the grand jury report on clergy sex abuse issued by Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro:

Importantly, in almost all cases, the accused named in the report was never afforded the right to rebut the charges. That is because the report was investigative, not evidentiary, though the report’s summary suggests that it is authoritative. It manifestly is not. Read More »

Seldom have I felt as comfortable in anyone’s presence as I did with Lynn and her family.  To her, they were probably only ordinary years.  But she had such a benevolent sense of life and projected such cheerfulness and optimism in her voice and her demeanor that those two years were a high point in my life. 

ALAN writes:

ONE DAY last March, I was looking for a newspaper death notice. I did not find it, but I found something I was not looking for: The death notice for a man whom I had played with when he was a baby in 1963.  He thus became one of the few people I have known and seen make the journey from birth to death.

It was in 1963 that I first heard the 1930s’ ballad “Deep Purple.”  Missourian Jane Froman recorded it in a beautifully arranged version in the 1950s.  Its tone and melody remind me of good friends of ours who are now deceased but who live in the deep purple of my memories.

On ordinary days in the spring of 1963, we became friends with a young married couple who were also our neighbors in a residential area of south St. Louis, less than a mile from where sheep grazed in fields behind a Catholic high school in the 1940s and where my great-aunt could look out the back window in her home and see a farm in the 1930s.  I will call them Ken and Lynn.  She was a housewife and he was a factory worker.  Color slides taken by my mother show them to be a handsome couple in the prime of life.  Their son was born that spring.  I played with their young daughter in our backyard. Read More »

IF AMERICANS KNEW writes:

Legislation to give Israel $38 billion over the next ten years is currently working its way through Congress. This is the largest military aid package in U.S. history.

Yet, while Israeli media are covering the legislation, virtually no U.S. news reports have informed American taxpayers about this proposed disbursement of their tax money.

The proposed military aid amounts to $23,000 per every Jewish Israeli family of four. (Aid to Israel has been on average about 7,000 times greater per capita than U.S. aid to others around the world.)

The proposed aid is divided between two bills. One has already passed, but the main bill is still before Congress.

IMAGINE if Indians became a minority in Calcutta. Imagine an Arab openly celebrating the demise of Indian culture.

Nuseir Yassin, known [as] Nas Daily, celebrates the demise of British culture in this video made for Facebook. Zionist Report writes: “And, if you are a non-White Goy, you should be offended by this too. Because after Europe (research the Coudenhove-Kalergi plan), your culture and race are next. In the end, if you don’t know who you are, and where you come from, you have no reason to defend it… and therefore much easier to control.”

TheMediaReport.com writes:

A priest washed out the mouth of a young sex assault victim with holy water? Another priest sodomized a boy with a crucifix? Another priest assaulted another kid multiple times on an airplane? 300 “predator priests”? The Church “did nothing”?

Are these sickening stories all true? No, they’re not, and we will show you explicitly in this special, two-part report.

Where does one begin to get at the truth of the recently released Pennsylvania grand jury report that has wrought breathless headlines across the globe? Here are two essential starting points: Read More »