Memories Lost Forever

ALAN writes:

It is a curse of life that as we age, we remember certain people who were acquaintances of our parents, people who were grown-ups when we were children, and we would like so much to talk with those people now—to ask them about their lives and their memories, to talk with them grown-up to grown-up instead of child to grown-up.  But of course it is too late.  They lived and died during the years when we were busily engaged in other things that seemed important at the time.  I made that terrible mistake.

These thoughts occurred to me recently when I watched a few 1963 episodes of the television comedy series “Petticoat Junction.” They were new to me because I never watched that series in the 1960s.  But my mother enjoyed watching it, I know, because I remember overhearing the show’s familiar opening theme music.

The stories involve a widow and her three high school age daughters at the hotel they run in a small town in the country.  A train brings guests to and from the hotel.  Those episodes present exactly the kind of gentle, old-fashioned, self-effacing, heartwarming and uplifting comedy writing that my mother enjoyed.  Viewers laughed with the characters, not at them.    (more…)

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Trump’s LGBTQ Moment

 

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BROTHER Nathanael Kapner analyses Trump’s statements in support of the “LGBTQ community” at the Republican Convention. The Republican Party has irretrievably abandoned its family values. It’s over. It can never go back. Every major institution in America is pitted against God and the laws of nature. (more…)

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Sarah Silverman on Jesus Christ

SARAH SILVERMAN, the Jewish "comedienne," was a celebrity warm-up act at the Democratic National Convention tonight in Philadelphia. Here she is in an earlier routine joking about the Crucifixion. She says she would happily crucify Christ again. (Profanity and blasphemy alert.)  

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No Normal and Healthy Woman

 

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SINCE we’re going to hear a lot of blather from the Democratic National Convention about how remarkable and wonderful it is that a woman is running for president, I would like to say something you will not hear in Philadelphia:

No normal and healthy woman would want to be president.

All kinds of women, with different temperaments, gifts and talents, exist in this world, but no normal and healthy woman would want to be president of the United States, not now, not yesterday and not tomorrow.

No normal and healthy woman would want to have such power over men, who deserve the empathetic help of women because of the onerous responsibilities and competition life imposes upon them.

No normal and healthy woman would want to be drawn into the combat of presidential politics, combat which is so contrary to her nature. (A queen arrives at her position involuntarily, a president must fight for it for many years.)

No normal and healthy woman would want to emasculate her husband by being so much more powerful than he is.

No normal and healthy woman would want to boss as many people around as a president does.

No normal and healthy woman would want to send troops to war.

No normal and healthy woman would want to have so little time to call friends, visit the sick, comfort the dying and enjoy the company of young children.

No normal and healthy woman would want to have so little time to pray for the people she loves.

No normal and healthy woman enjoys being hated. A president accumulates many enemies.

No normal and healthy woman would want the complete lack of peace and quiet that comes with the presidency.

No normal and healthy woman is fulfilled by power.

No normal and healthy woman would want to promote the false idea to young and impressionable women that power is fulfilling.

With rare exceptions, women presidents, chancellors and prime ministers are sure to be deformed and cheated human beings, deprived of reaching their true potential by the androgynization of their societies.

No normal and healthy woman would want to be president. (more…)

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The Diabolical Trap

[W]e live in the midst of a diabolical trap, the likes of which were described so accurately by Father Edward Leen, S.J., sixty-three years ago.... The devil continues to raise up men and women who are so completely committed to evil that anyone, including those who support the sins that cry out to Heaven for vengeance, which can never be the foundation of making any nation “great” or “safe,” no matter the protestations of the man who believes that he “alone” can “fix” problems that have been caused by this nation’s promotion of sin and many of citizens’ unrepentant persistence in it, are said to look “better” by comparison. Believe what you want. This diabolical trap remains what it has been since July 4, 1776, no amount of projecting one’s fondest [hopes] onto secular saviours can make them into instruments of justice when they are, objectively speaking, unjust in their own lives and supportive of injustice [to] God and the good of souls in the public realm. This is simple truth. Those who reject it prefer to believe in an illusion of their own making as there is no semblance of rationality to believe that men will be different once elected to office than they had been beforehand. Alas, the problems that we face are supernatural, not merely natural, which means there is no merely natural solution for them. --- Thomas Droleskey, July 25, 2016

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Democrats to the Death

THE "I-am-personally-opposed-to-abortion,-but-support-legalization-of-it-for-others" position held by many Catholic politicians, including Tim Kaine, the vice presidential choice of Hillary Clinton, has been explicitly condemned by a pope and is contrary to Catholic moral theology. Pope Pius IX stated in 1930: Those who hold the reins of government should not forget that it is the duty of public authority by appropriate laws and sanctions to defend the lives of the innocent, and this all the more so since those whose lives are endangered and assailed cannot defend themselves. Among whom we must mention in the first place infants hidden in the mother's womb. And if the public magistrates not only do not defend them, but by their laws and ordinances betray them to death at the hands of doctors or of others, let them remember that God is the Judge and Avenger of innocent blood which cried from earth to Heaven. (Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, December 30, 1930.) Dr. Thomas Droleskey gives a detailed history, ugly as it is, of how this casuistic position came about and captivated Catholic voters. It originated with the Kennedy family in the 1960s, as Catholics sought to maintain their allegiance to the Democratic Party at all costs: The former Jesuit priest Albert Jonsen, emeritus professor of ethics at the University of Washington, recalls the meeting [between the Kennedys and theologians] in his book "The Birth of Bioethics" (Oxford, 2003). He writes about how he joined with the Rev.…

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The Cult of Liberty

FROM an essay by the Most Rev. Donald Sanborn: The world has never known more oppressive governments or bigger governments than those which profess the cult of liberty. No governments have meddled more in the lives of their citizens. Since the abolition of the monarchies and the rise of democracies, the common man, the family and business have been subject to tyrannical oppression, emaciating taxation, as well as economic and social “engineering” which affects every aspect of life. The democracies of the past two hundred years make the most dictatorial monarchical regimes look like liberty fests. With democracy have come both liberalism and socialism, two sources of oppression for hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, over the past two hundred years. This fact tells us that the liberty which the cult of liberty seeks is not the freedom of the common man from big, oppressive, and tyrannical governments. It is a freedom from something else which the cult of liberty seeks.

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An Ordinary Encounter

ALAN writes:

One day last week I went into a store that sells old records and movies.  I made a small purchase.  When the lady behind the counter saw that I had selected some of the 1930s-‘40s B-Westerns of Hoppy, Gene, and Roy, she told me she had just watched an episode of the TV series “The Lone Ranger.” Like me, she was old enough to remember that series from the 1950s.  But the thing that struck her most when watching that episode, she said, was “how racist it was.” It was disgraceful how townspeople in the story treated the Indian Tonto, she said, and such disrespect would not be permitted in entertainment today. (more…)

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The Dallas False Flag

  DON'T worry. It's all fake gunfire, with staged videos and photos. (Mild profanity.)

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“Clinton Cash”

A MOVIE based on the book Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer is going to be released on the Internet for free this weekend. (I assume it is funded by Republicans.) Between 2001 and 20015, the Clintons made about $200 million, most of it one form of bribery or another, Schweizer contends. The vast sums the Clintons took in, much of it through the Clinton Foundation, is undisputed. Contributions to the foundation, the author contends, were often given in exchange for political favors, and for much of that time Hillary was secretary of state. "You can go from Columbia, to India, to sub-Saharan Africa, to Europe, to Asia, and wherever there’s somebody that needs a deal, the Clintons are there to monetize access,” Schweizer says. This documentary about the book alleges they profited from NGO work in Haiti after the earthquake.

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Academic Freedom — For Some

THE GOP platform calls for a free exchange of ideas at America’s universities — well, almost free. Every idea should be discussed openly, says the platform. Except one idea. That should not be permitted. The one idea? Condemnation of Israel.

The platform states:

Improving Higher Education

Our colleges, universities, and trade schools, large and small, public and private, form the world’s greatest assemblage of learning. They drive much of the research that keeps America competitive and, by admitting large numbers of foreign students, convey our values and culture to the world. Their excellence is undermined by an ideological bias deeply entrenched within the current university system. Whatever the solution may be in private institutions, in state schools the trustees have a responsibility to the taxpayers to ensure that their enormous investment is not abused for political indoctrination. We call on state officials to preserve our public colleges, universities, and trade schools as places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance or “safe zones,” as if college students need protection from the free exchange of ideas. A student’s First Amendment rights do not end at the schoolhouse gates. Colleges, universities, and trade schools must not infringe on their freedom of speech and association in the name of political correctness.We condemn the campus-based BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) campaign against Israel. It is anti-Semitism and should be denounced by advocates of academic freedom. [emphasis added]

Does this make any sense? (more…)

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The Model Minority: Dignity of Labor Edition

A CHINESE woman in a wealthy Minneapolis suburb has been formally charged with labor trafficking, imprisonment and assault in connection with her employment of a nanny, also from China:

[A]ccording to authorities, hidden behind the white columns and red brick of Lili Huang’s $539,000 house on Wellington Lane was the most heinous of abuse.

The nanny, who has not been named, began working for the wealthy Huang family in Shanghai, where she took care of Huang’s minor daughter, according to a criminal complaint obtained by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Huangs treated her well in China, the nanny told authorities, so she agreed work for them in the United States. (more…)

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