FIRM evidence that Russia hacked the U.S. election does not exist. Most Americans probably don’t even care. But say it often enough — “Russia hacked the U.S. election,” “Russia is undermining our democracy” — and it becomes true.

A Congress of dumbbells is now leading us to war. Millions of ordinary Russian people will be hurt by the new sanctions voted for by Congress and awaiting Trump’s signature.

The White House says President Donald Trump will sign legislation implementing tough new financial sanctions against Russia.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says in a statement that Trump read early drafts of the bill and “negotiated regarding critical elements of it.”

She says the president has “reviewed the final version and, based on its responsiveness to his negotiations, approves the bill and intends to sign it.”

The legislation includes language that bars Trump from easing or waiving the additional penalties on Russia unless Congress agrees. It also imposes financial sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

Moscow has responded by ordering a reduction in the number of U.S. diplomats in Russia and closing the U.S. Embassy’s recreation retreat. [Source]

Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute comments, “They’ve established as a fact on the ground that Russia hacked the election and therefore no one needs to question it…. People in Congress are not very well informed.”

Trump has been backed into a corner. “We have passed the line of rationality,” says Former US diplomat Jim Jatras. “They [Congress] want to take away from the president one of his most solemn duties as the Commander in Chief, which is the conduct of affairs with foreign states and they want basically to put the Mark of Cain on Russia .. not a declaration of war, militarily, but a political war.”

Ron Paul writes of hostility toward Iran and North Korea: (more…)

BEWARE of the recently-released movie The Keepers about the 1969 murder of the Baltimore nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik. See more at TheMediaReport.com.

WHAT HAPPENS in the Orthodox Jewish community when a family accuses someone of sexually molesting a child? The victims are shunned, bullied and persecuted in many cases, as the community at large tries to prevent public airing of the crimes and criminal charges. See this unusually probing 2012 piece in The New York Times. From the article: Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said. “Try living for one day with all the pain I am living with,” Mr. Jungreis [father of a victim], spent and distraught, said recently outside his new apartment on Williamsburg’s outskirts. “Did anybody in the Hasidic community in these two years, in Borough Park, in Flatbush, ever come up and look my son in the eye and tell him a good word? Did anybody take the courage to show him mercy in the street?” A few blocks away, Pearl Engelman, a 64-year-old great-grandmother, said her community had failed her too. In 2008, her son, Joel, told rabbinical authorities that he had been repeatedly groped as a child by a school official at the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg. The school briefly removed the official but denied the accusation. And when Joel turned 23,…

S., a female Indian immigrant, writes:

Scene: Inside the subway on a hot day in New York, in a packed car with no air conditioning.

Participants: Me, average New Yorkers and a Chinese father and daughter pair seated opposite me. The girl is dressed in a skirt and blouse.

A white girl in her early 20s boards the car. She is dressed in a see-through white, cotton vest with a colored bikini under it and denim shorts. She proceeds to take off the vest and ties it around her waist, presumably because she is melting from the heat.

Chinese Father erupts in a low volume, jaw-grinding volley of Mandarin, pointing towards the white girl and then gesticulating a slapping motion, presumably implying that should his girl ever be in a state of undress in a packed subway he would spank her. Meanwhile the men are staring at the beautiful, educated young women, possibly a student in an elite institution, in her bikini.

Liberalism is doing away with your values while allowing minorities to stick to their own. (more…)

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THE fashion designer Coco Chanel (1883-1971) played a powerful role in changing women’s fashions. One of her most significant influences involved pants.

It is hard today, when most women wear pants all the time, to conceive of how revolutionary was this change, which allegedly began when she started wearing sailors trousers on the beach in the French Riviera. Up until the 1930s, women in the West universally wore dresses and skirts. If you look at photos of street scenes in those years, there are no women — none — in pants.

Interestingly, Chanel later expressed regrets:

Although during the war women often had to wear trousers when working in traditionally male jobs, Chanel played a huge part in accelerating their popularity as a fashion item. While at the society beach resort of Deauville she chose to wear sailor’s pants instead of a swimming costume to avoid exposing herself, and the style spread quickly as her legions of followers emulated her. In the end, the designer regretted how her careless decision affected the course of fashion history. Aged 86 she said: “I came up with them by modesty.  From this usage to it becoming a fashion, having 70% of women wearing trousers at evening dinner is quite sad.” (Source)

The wearing of pants is almost universally considered today to be a form of liberation. But others, rarely quoted, maintained back then that it was a sign of a growing inferiority complex.

The skirt or dress was an emblem of a woman’s inherent dignity. Like a priest’s vestments, it had an almost ceremonial quality. Here are some early dresses designed by Chanel, who later popularized the more austere black dress:

The wearing of pants signified a desire to be like men. It represented an envy of men — and envy is always based in a fundamental misunderstanding of the envied.

Guiseppe Cardinal Siri wrote in 1960 on the effects on the psychology of women in a pastoral letter:

Masculine clothing changes the psychology of women

In truth, the motive that impels women to wear the clothing of men is not always to imitate him, but rather to compete with the man who is considered stronger, less encumbered and more independent. This motivation shows clearly that masculine dress is a visible support to bring about a mental attitude of being ‘like a man.’ Further, since the existence of man, the clothing a person wears conditions, determines and modifies the gestures, attitudes and conduct of a person. Thus, just by its wearing, the clothing comes to impose a particular state of spirit in the person.

Permit us to add that a woman who always wears the clothing of men more or less indicates that she is reacting to her femininity as if it were inferior, when in fact it is only different. The perversion of her psychology is clearly evident.

These reasons, added to many others, are sufficient to warn us of how mistaken is the thinking of women who wear men’s dress.

Today it seems that women will always wear pants. But it is inevitable that they rediscover and take pride in the distinctiveness of femininity. (more…)

— Fr. Ronald Knox (more…)

S.K. writes:

Once again, you’ve touched on a powerful topic. Tattoos, which I am not in the slightest a fan of, are ubiquitous. I don’t like them on women especially; none at all. Find a woman (young, mature or even old) that doesn’t have at least three – if you can. I remember when they started becoming popular with all social classes in the 90’s. Prior to that I only noticed former military, bikers, hoodlums, etc., to have tattoos and even with them they were usually kept to a minimum of one and and kept out of sight. Then the yuppies, the college kids, everybody and their mother basically started getting tattoos.

You wrote:

“A young woman who sliced some bread I bought yesterday was wearing a nose ring. She seemed a nice, polite girl, but I wondered, was she afraid to seem ordinary? Why? Does she take some weird pleasure in shocking and repelling?”

She is mindlessly following her peer group, or she feels small in a big world and wants to signal that she is here too, and that she matters and should be paid attention too as well. I recently chatted up a lovely young woman that had a nose ring. I had not noticed it at first but once I did it sort of bothered me. She was so down-to-earth and sweet, and yet this thin strip of metal was jarring me. (more…)

THE OVER-USE of the expression “I love you” reduces its powerful meaning, writes Dr. Marian Horvat:

These words signify one of the highest and noblest sentiments of man. Love is an act of the will that indicates that he desires the best possible for the person who benefits from his affections and is willing to sacrifice himself for that end. Scriptures speaks splendidly of love as charity and poets make grandiloquent verses in its honor.

It used to be that these words, which have a deep significance, were not spoken lightly. They were reserved for very special occasions and said only for particular persons and relationships, parents and children, husbands and wives, etc. When the suitor first spoke them to the young lady he was courting, it was a moment to be remembered and cherished. (more…)

IN CASE YOU MISSED this story:

Abortion workers might have delivered babies alive and then killed them in order to harvest their body parts, the House Select Panel on Infant Lives revealed in an interim report on the one-year anniversary of the release of the Center for Medical Progress videos. (more…)

THE NOTION that all income must be earned is not just.

That’s because even earned income is a result of gifts that are unearned: natural resources and a cultural inheritance of technological innovations, law and language.

Everyone, by virtue of being human not by virtue of being a hard worker, is rightfully entitled to some monetary share of these gifts.

But how can such a thing be? Money can only be earned.

Not so. In a monetary system such as that proposed by Social Credit theorists, everyone receives some part of this communal legacy in the form of money. M. Oliver Heydorn explains it:

For ideological and no doubt political reasons, orthodox economics has tried to bury the gift, to exile it from the sphere of economics with the mantra, endlessly repeated like a form of Chinese water-torture, ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch!’

     In direct opposition to the teachings of economic orthodoxy, Social Credit theory affirms the existence of the ‘unearned increment of association’. In sober truth, the much maligned ‘free lunch’ is a reality that is operative in all spheres of activity with which we are familiar, including the act of production.

     Being, that is, reality or nature, is constructed in such a way then when two or more different elements are brought into the proper relationship or association with each, the power which these elements then have to be or to effect change in the world is greater than the mere sum of the component parts. That is, power or output can be multiplied by the apparent ‘magic’ of association, with the surplus (i.e., that which exceeds the isolated contribution of each element) supervening on the association as whole as a superabundant gift. The surplus is not the exclusive property of any one component, nor is it in any way earned by them. It is a something for nothing, or a free lunch.

     One of the simplest examples of the unearned increment of association is that of a lever. A lever is a mechanical device that consists in the association of a beam or plank with a fulcrum on which the beam may pivot. By applying force at one end of the beam, levers allow human beings to move weights on the other end with less effort than a direct application of force would require. The effort saved, or alternatively, the movement of an object that could not otherwise be achieved with the force on hand, is the unearned increment of association that accrues to the human being who is intelligent enough to make use of the lever. (more…)

  FROM an essay by Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, "Be Wise as Serpents and Simple as Doves:" Harmonious in line, simple in color, graceful in its flight and movement, "affable" with other animals, pure and candid in its whole being, the dove has nothing in itself to suggest the idea of plunder, aggression, injustice, intemperance or impurity. It is, therefore, most appropriate that in the words of Our Savior, it is a symbol of innocence. But it lacks something: the qualities that assures its survival in the struggle against adverse factors. Its perspicacity is minimal, its combativeness zero, its only defense is flight. That is why the Holy Spirit tells us, “Imbecile doves, without intelligence!” (Os 7: 11). This reminds us of certain Catholics deformed by Romanticism, for whom virtue consists only and always in hiding, in submitting in receiving blows, in retreating, and in allowing themselves to be trampled underfoot. * How different is the serpent – aggressive, venomous, deceptive, astute and agile! Elegant but repugnant, fragile enough to be crushed by a boy yet dangerous enough to kill a lion with its venom. His whole shape and way of moving is adapted for a veiled, treacherous and lightning fast attack. So bewitching that certain species mesmerize its victim but it emits and spreads an aura of terror. Thus it is the symbol of evil, with all the sorcery and all the treachery of the forces of perdition. However in all…

BRITISH composer John Tavener (1944-2013) had “a profound sense of silence.” In his book Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music (read an excerpt here), Robert B. Reilly, who made this comment, says Tavener was one of three influential composers who have laid the atonality of modern music to rest. “The tyranny is now gone and tonality is back,” Reilly writes.

The words to Tavener’s choral composition, Mother and Child:

Mother and Child

Enamoured of its gaze
The mother’s gaze in turn
Contrived a single beam of light
Along which love may move.
Hail Maria!
Hail Sophia!
Hail Maria! (more…)

NBC reports: A husband and wife from Queens have pleaded guilty to enslaving two children from Korea, forcing them to do housework, provide massages, and turn over pay from outside jobs, prosecutors in New York said Wednesday. The Flushing couple — 54-year-old Jeong Taek Lee and his wife, 50-year-old Sook Yeon Park — were charged on two counts of labor trafficking. Lee was sentenced to five months’ probation, while his wife faces six months in prison followed by five years’ probation.

  DID you ever hear a plumber say, "I hate unblocking pipes. I hate it! I wish there was no such thing as the sewer line?" Did you ever hear an electrician say, "I can't stand wiring houses! Oh, I just hate electricity and wish it didn't exist?" Or how about a construction worker? Have you ever heard one say, "I hate nailing. I wish we all lived in grass huts so I didn't have to nail anything together ever again?" Probably not. For it is only the modern woman, under the influence of the Great Home-Hating Feminist Psy-Op, who goes about saying how much she hates, hates, hates the menial labor she has to do, as if she were a forest-clearing slave in the Siberian gulag rather than an independent domestic boss surrounded by nifty home-cleaning innovations that would be the envy of pre-industrial peasants. Frances Gabe (1915-2016) was a housewife who detested and resented housework. She became especially ticked off when her children got fig jam on the walls. Jam on the walls! Oh, how boring, tedious and totally beneath the "educated" (or miseducated) woman! Gabe reportedly was so fed up that she decided to invent and build a self-cleaning house (we don't know whether she tried to teach her children how to clean instead). She invented one over a long period. The result was entirely impractical and necessarily ugly due to the need to encase everything in plastic or other waterproof coverings to withstand cleaning…