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THERESA BYRNE writes at Finer Femininity: When I grew up our life was very simple. We lived in a one bedroom home with seven children. In our tiny kitchen you could see the dirt ground under the linoleum. We had to pump the septic out all the time and the highlight of our week was hoping to see “Uncle Mark” on Sunday evening. And yet our fondest memories are of those times. We grew a huge garden out back and it was not unusual to see my dad lying in the sunshine, in-between rows of tomatoes, taking a cat nap. When autumn came, dressed in her gowns of orange and yellow, we would rake piles of leaves and play long into the evening, only coming in when it was time to say night prayers and go to bed. We lived our days down by the creek skipping rocks, up in the mulberry tree picking berries and in the back yard, playing on our old, rickety jungle gym. Snack time consisted of celery and peanut butter, date balls or nuts and raisins. We lived simply and happily.. Now don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for electricity and don’t want to go back to days without air conditioning, but to slow down a bit, relearn to “stop and smell the roses”, I think that would be lovely!

ANN CORCORAN at Refugee Resettlement Watch writes: Huge companies, many of them multinational corporations, are, according to the International Rescue Committee (America’s wealthiest refugee contracting agency), scooping up refugee workers and training them apparently rather than spending the money to train needy African American or other American citizens. The International Rescue Committee tells us that ‘do-gooderism’ is secondary to making smart business decisions that they say are driving these companies. (Ha! I bet the IRC’s volunteers think this is all about humanitarian zeal!) Americans first! Wouldn’t it be smart to train and hire needy American citizens first especially in cities hard hit by unemployment that leads to hopelessness and crime? Apparently not!

OBAMA has pledged $38 billion to Israel over a ten year period, starting in 2017. It is the largest military aid package in U.S. history. Meanwhile, about 40,000 American veterans of recent wars are homeless on any given night.

FROM The Great Truths, Daily Meditations by Rev. R. F. Clarke, S. J.:

We are all of us jealous of what belongs to ourselves. We resent it if any one interferes with it, or deprives us of any portion of it. Yet no one owns anything by a title so absolute as that by which God is the Lord and owner of all creatures in the universe. My body and my soul are His; everything I possess is His; every action, every thought belongs to Him. He has given all these in charge to me to use for Him. Do I do so?

God is moreover a God infinite in knowledge and in power. His all-seeing eye overlooks nothing, forgets nothing, passes nothing by. No one shall escape who takes anything from Him, and does not give Him His due. God will not forget the ill use that men make of His gifts, though they themselves soon forget it. Have I not therefore cause to tremble when I think how often I have behaved as if I were my own master, independent of God? (more…)

A MUST-SEE video (though not for the faint of heart). (more…)

MAKE-UP companies advertise products that are "cruelty-free" to animals while at the same time encouraging women to look cruel. Kidist Paulos Asrat contemplates one make-up company's pitch.

THE Brookings Institute says Europeans who are upset about the influx of immigrants are suffering from a neurotic fear of change. Matthew Groh and Tara Vishwanath write:

We find that neophobia—the fear of anything new and unfamiliar—is one of the root causes of anti-immigration opinion. Since immigrants are both foreign and unfamiliar, neophobes are often lumped together with xenophobes as people who fear immigrants. The difference is that neophobes overcome their fear through acquaintance, whereas xenophobes hold their fears constant. (more…)

  FRANZ HÖRMANN, professor of accounting at the University of Economics in Vienna, explains what is wrong with our monetary system. Money should be in the service of production and families; production and families should not be in the service of money.

THERE is reason to suspect that the person who emerged from Chelsea Clinton’s apartment on Sunday after Hillary Clinton’s collapse at a 9/11 memorial was not Hillary Clinton. The contrast was so noticeable that even the mainstream media has covered the story. The double was thinner than Hillary and was conspicuously not surrounded by body guards, as if a full view of her as healthy and not debilitated was desired. It is unlikely that she could have recovered this quickly (within 90 minutes), if she did indeed collapse. If this was a double, it had to have been arranged well in advance.

[Update: It couldn’t be a Hillary impersonator. The voice in this video is definitely that of Hillary.] (more…)

DONALD TRUMP is the first presidential candidate who has spoken of the possibility of a rigged election. The website Election Night Gatekeepers looks at the vote-counting process, and it ain’t pretty:

This is what happens on the November election night across the USA since at least as far back as 1988:

Four Three Mysterious Mega-Companies “count” the vote on the November Election Night.

One of the traits of these “Election Count” gatekeepers is that they periodically change names, and/or buy each other, but the players and background forces remain essentially the same. These surface changes of ownership and change of names seems designed to give the impression that the gatekeepers are diverse as opposed to comprising a monolithic force, and perhaps to try and keep ahead of the investigations and criminal indictments that should have come long ago. (more…)

ON a week that marks the 15th-anniversary of 9/11, it’s incumbent on Americans to recall the death and destruction the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 ultimately brought to the mostly Muslim country of Iraq. The second Iraq war began in March, 2003. The author David Swanson wrote in 2013:

At 10 years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation (to use the original name with the appropriate acronym, OIL) and over 22 years since Operation Desert Storm, there is little evidence that any significant number of people in the United States have a realistic idea of what our government has done to the people of Iraq, or of how these actions compare to other horrors of world history. A majority of Americans believe the war since 2003 has hurt the United States but benefitted Iraq. A plurality of Americans believe, not only that Iraqis should be grateful, but that Iraqis are in fact grateful. (more…)

THE FIRST Anti-Vatican II song, Vatican 2! What the Heck Are You?, has been released by True Restoration, and it's a winner! It's a catchy tune, sung and performed by the outstanding Damo, and I know you'll like it. "Oh, Vatican Two! You are the Great Apostasy!... Oh, Vatican Two! It's easy to tell, You're not from heaven, You are straight from Hell!" Sing it after the latest Bergoglian bombs have been detonated. Listen here or here. Oh Vatican Two! Influenced by Bugnini, instead of wine and bread you're using beer and linguini You've stolen our churches, cathedrals, and our name, our monasteries and convents which soon we will reclaim. Oh Vatican Two! Where did you come from? If you did not exist I would not have to sing this song! Religious Liberty, and Existentialism, the Dignity of Man, and False Ecumenism. Oh Vatican Two! Your days are numbered. Your cupboard is bare just like Mother Hubbard. The truth never changes this is not to be debated We look forward to the day when you will be annihilated! O Glorious Prince of the Heavenly Host, St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

FROM the satirical publication, The Onion: In an effort to strengthen their relationship and foster interfaith dialogue, Pope Francis reportedly welcomed the winged Mayan snake god Kukulkan to the Vatican this week as part of a month-long deity exchange program. “We are excited to have the War Serpent staying here with us for the next four weeks, during which time he’ll be exposed to the rituals and customs of the Catholic Church, so that when he returns home he can share the experience with his adherents in Chichén Itzá and the surrounding Yucután communities,” said Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke, noting that the pontiff had taken Kukulkan out for pizza on the first night of the exchange before showing him around some of Rome’s most famous landmarks.

HILLARY'S illness is genuine, in my opinion, but it may be more serious than she is letting on. Mike King at The Anti-New York Times considers several other possibilities, including this one: The illness and the E-mail scandal are part of a clever pity & divert strategy to prevent the Trump campaign and the "conservative" media from attacking a poor sick little woman (the pity); and to focus on controversies other than the dozen or so women that Bill Clinton has raped, groped and flashed (the diversion) -- some of whom Killary has intimidated or ridiculed. The "Rape Card" is the one issue [that] would destroy Killary in a matter of days, and it strikes fear into the black hearts of the Marxists. All Killary has to do is "recover" a few weeks before the election and it will then be to late for Trump to counter-attack and play the long awaited "Rape Card" -- which Trump and adviser Roger Stone had both so carelessly telegraphed months ago.

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  HILLARY kept her pneumonia diagnosis secret for three days.

ALAN writes:

Like A. Wood, I was a school resister.  But I was much dumber than him.  I sat through nine years of it as an obedient little lamb.  And then I became a rebel.

In “Boys Hate School” [ Oct. 29, 2015 ], you wrote:  “The modern secular school is an impersonal factory.”

You are too generous.  I suggest that modern secular schools are child-crushing factories.

Schooling has nothing to do with learning.  It has to do with power, babysitting, and hatred of responsibility:  Power over parents and children throughout an artificially-prolonged childhood, and hatred of responsibility by parents who think their children should be somebody else’s responsibility.

It was in the mid-1960s that I came to hate schooling.

In the 1930s, my mother and uncle walked to their parochial school in south St. Louis.   But my uncle was not fond of school.  On some days he persuaded my mother to play hooky with him.  At age 14 he quit school and got a job within walking distance from their home.  It was possible to do that in those years, and it was work that he wanted to do.  Fortunately my grandparents had the supreme good sense not to call him a “dropout”, not to cajole him into going back to school, and not to call in “experts” or “professionals” to “help” him adjust himself to other people’s expectations of what he should be doing.  Instead, they had the profound wisdom to leave him alone.  They knew he was happy and was contributing to the family income.  There were no problems.  He got along just fine. (more…)