BILLED AS the biggest mass shooting in American history, the reported events at an Orlando, Florida nightclub this weekend have all the earmarks of manufactured terrorism. Even if many people were murdered and even if this was an act of Islamic terrorism, the events as reported have numerous familiar signs of being staged and therefore we should approach all reports with serious skepticism. Get out your remote controls and pizza poppers, folks, and let the oh-so-predictabe plot unfold:

[This post has been updated and revised]

Notice the following:

** The immediate solving of the crime, violating all norms of criminal investigation

** The familiar blaming of Islamic terrorists, who have no rational goal and who risk their countries being further blown to smithereens as a result

** ISIS reportedly involved

** The death of the gunman, eliminating the possibility of a trial and public questioning

** Implausible details, such as the gunman wielding a semi-automatic rifle and a handgun at the same time; the lack of anyone in a room that probably held dozens of beefed-up weightlifters tackling him while he shot 103 people (50 dead and 53 wounded) and his reported leaving of the nightclub and then returning (didn’t anyone consider locking him out?)

** Unconvincing video footage from the scene, even though the nightclub was obviously packed to the hilt with cell phone recording devices

** The dead reportedly left in the nightclub for many hours, a violation of standard emergency protocols in which anyone recently wounded is immediately evacuated to a hospital

** A relative who sheds no real tears, seems remarkably at ease in front of the camera and launches into a scripted speech about gun control (look closely and notice how she continually looks down at something she is reading) and One World Love

** Promotion of sexual deviancy

** Fundraising appeals for victims that begin almost before the bodies are cold

** Immediate promotion of gun control:

** One World B.S., seemingly scripted well in advance, from our Commander in Chief with deep-felt “honesty” written all over his face:

“In the face of hate and violence, we will love one another,” he said. “We will not give in to fear or turn against each other. Instead, we will stand united as Americans to protect our people and defend our nation, and to take action against those who threaten us.”

Donald Trump immediately rushed to blame ISIS as well. If there were a few journalists in this country they might ask Our Noble, Incredibly Macho Savior how he knows for sure, so quickly after this event, that “ISIS” was involved? I know Trump has all the makings of a great king, and everything, and has single-handedly resurrected masculinity in this country, but answer me: This guy is going to be president and yet he does not follow the minimal precautions involved in solving major crimes before creating mass hysteria that could conceivably lead us to more war? Hmm. He’s either stupid or a fake himself.

Ready to send more of your sons and daughters to battle, America?

(more…)

SEX ACTS with animals are legal in Canada, with some exceptions, according to a new ruling by the Canadian Supreme Court. More details here.

NICK writes:

Salon defends their very own writer – and self proclaimed pedophile – Todd Nickerson. Of course,  Nickerson is seen as an example of virtue because 1) he embraces his pedophile identity proudly and 2) refrains from hurting others at the same time (allegedly). “Love wins,” you see. [Warning: This article contains indecent scenes.] (more…)

  APROPOS of the recent entries on older women and dress, I offer this 2012 entry: ALAN writes: One day three years ago, I happened by chance to see an elderly woman walking slowly near an apartment building. She was dressed all in white and wearing an attractive white hat. Her distinctive dress caught my eye, and I thought to myself how extraordinary – and pleasant – it was to see such a lady in a culture where so many women agree to dress like men or adolescents. About a year after that, I caught sight of the same woman, walking slowly and using a cane. She wore a white blouse, black-and-gray dress, black dress shoes, and a hat the color of straw. Everything about her suggested gracefulness and good taste. Many comments posted at your blog pertain to vanishing standards of dress, demeanor, and femininity. Thankfully, there are still some women who choose not to abandon those standards. Clancy Strock had such women in mind when he wrote: “…our older citizens are the ones you can count on to show up in public places nicely dressed.” (Reminisce magazine, March/April 1998) And St. Francis de Sales said: “Old people are always ridiculous when they try to appear young. Instead, let them adorn themselves with gracefulness, decency, and dignity.” This woman obviously possessed that wisdom. At her age, she still paid the kind of careful attention to appearance and demeanor that many American women practiced scrupulously…

RACHEL C. writes from Anchorage, Alaska:

I want you to know how enriching your website is to me. I have been a reader for a few years. It brings me comfort that I and my family are not the only ones who, in thinking things through, can consider the devastating outcomes of the moral and social insanity happening in this day and age. We are on a downward spiral, but I trust that where there are tares, there is also wheat, like you. -:)

In response to The Unisex Gnome, you are right on! I have noticed the majority of older people that I can’t tell “what” they are, but in the rare occasion that I notice a feminine older lady, my heart smiles so big! I feel a connection with a woman who has gone before me, I feel inspired and hopeful. I often remind our daughters (11, 9, and 7) that when I am old “no matter what put my lipstick on.” They know what that means… that I still want to look like a woman! (We also have two sons, 17 and 14, but I don’t want them anywhere near me with lipstick, lol!)

Five years ago, I was at Costco with my husband, wearing a plaid dress (Christmas colors). I have always preferred skirts and dresses, even when I was growing up. Never trying to make a statement or anything, just enjoy them. -:) Anyways I was in the frozen foods section, when this middle-aged man from across the way parked his grocery cart, turned around to face me, approached me, and said, quite loudly, but friendly-like, “YOU are wearing a DRESS!” I was shocked, but I love a surprise, so I was softly laughing. He said “WOW! You are so refreshing! You made my whole holidays!” I’ve come to the summation that we dress, not for ourselves, but for society. It is a service to be clearly a woman, so as not to confuse anyone, and hopefully to brighten someone’s day.

I thank God that He created me a woman and, despite my 80’s and early 90’s upbringing in the Bay Area of California, I am not ashamed or embarrassed to be a woman. I don’t reject it on any level. I consider it a privilege and Christian responsibility. (more…)

UP until now, most women in advanced age maintained outward vestiges of femininity, belonging as they did to a culture that honored it. Though they might wear pants, detracting from the softness of their form, they would also wear light-colored, feminine blouses, have their hair done into puffy styles, and perhaps use lipstick. But these were women who did not grow up under the true Cult of Androgyny. These were women who took pride in their femininity and did not despise it, as feminists have taught us to despise ourselves.

Now the first women who were introduced into the Cult of Androgyny in youth or middle age are approaching the extremes of life. Yesterday, I saw a depressing sight.

She was a woman, probably in her eighties, slowly walking down the street with a cane. My first thought was that she was a tiny old man. Her hair was short and no-nonsense. She wore jeans and a dark green, zippered sweatshirt. There was nothing decorative about her. There was not a shred of anything useless. Feminine ornamentation brightens our surroundings and defies utilitarianism even on a very old woman. These clothes, normally ugly on a young person, look dramatically worse on an old person.  Old age alone removes many signs of the woman. Add unisex clothes to the mix, and the woman is gone. Femininity does not ultimately consist of clothes. The clothes express the person. So when we say the woman is gone, she is gone because she left her own essence. But clothes, in turn, affect the mentality and styles are imposed by a culture. What does a no-nonsense woman in very advanced age do with her no-nonsenseness?

There are going to be lots of Puritanical man-women like her soon. Perhaps they are truly in the American tradition, as the Puritans abhorred ornamentation too.

I wonder if these Puritanical, androgynous … What are they? We cannot call them ladies! But can we even call them women? How about persons? I wonder if these persons will be unhappy in some way they cannot pinpoint. After all, they have been robbed. They should feel cheated. A feminine older woman, in her delicacy and fragility, evokes warmth from others. One senses in her, maternal affection and tenderness, things of which the world never, ever, ever has enough. One senses her feminine dignity. A tiny, fragile gnome is interesting perhaps, but not attractive. Androgyny has cheated her of her essence.

We should love these elderly gnomes. After all, they are ours. Like all very old people, they do not have to have any usefulness or even be likable. Their purpose is to be and to sanctify us by eliciting our charity and protectiveness simply by their being and by their undeniable state of dependency. But their androgyny will rob us too. It will rob us of some of the reassuring landscape of age. (more…)

PAUL C. writes:

The Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, and The Wild Ones are examples of misplaced sympathy for white punks in the 1950s and early 1960s.  It is the same ideology that was later transferred to black punks and remains.  The idea is the punks don’t need discipline or deserve punishment, they need sympathy, understanding, and money from the establishment.

It is not their fault.  It is someone else’s fault.  The brief smile they put on Marlon Brando’s criminal face at the very end of The Wild Ones was supposed to be proof punks were sweethearts.  I wanted to punch Brando’s character yet again when I finally watched the stupid movie to the very end in the last year.  (I must have been very tired and lazy.) (more…)

THE canonization of Muhammad Ali in the press has left out some inconvenient facts. As Michael Hoffman puts it, “The Media’s Saint of the Diversity Religion was anything but…” Ali sometimes spoke refreshing common sense on race. He had the audacity to say, regarding the various races, “God made us different.” He said he loved his own race and everyone should love their own. However, after a trip to Africa, he said:

“Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.” (more…)

  FROM Positive Money: If someone told you that a mountain of personal debt could be cleared via 3 simple changes to the way that money and banking works, would you like to know how? Would you like to see a more stable economy, with more jobs, less personal and government debt? Would you like to see money created free of debt and going into the real economy and support businesses, instead of getting trapped in financial and property markets? This video explains how 3 simple changes to the way that money and banking works would make all this (and much more) possible.

FROM the photo blog of Kidist Asrat Paulos

  THE EUROPEAN elite have been playing with the occult for many years, a fact which has been particularly noticeable in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. But the most chilling and disturbing example is the recent opening ceremony for the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland. The longest and deepest train tunnel in the world, Gotthard traverses the Swiss Alps and cost 11 billion Euros to build. Nine miners died during its construction, which took 17 years. The opening ceremonies for this great feat of engineering, hailed as a force for European unification, were attended by some of the most powerful people in Europe, including Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Switzerland’s President Johann Schneider-Ammann, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Francois Hollande. Many thousands of spectators were also in attendance. With zombies, scarabs, human/goats, flying demons, embracing lesbians and almost-naked, pale-white walking corpses, the ceremonies were similar to a secret society ritual, but in full open display. Watching it, one almost expects a human sacrifice to be performed at any minute. The Gotthard ritual was split into 2 separate events, one for elite dignitaries inside the tunnel and the other outside in Erstfeld for the thousands of public attendees. Both were laced with graphic demonic symbolism, and broadcast live across the world through RT, BBC and other major European outlets. The indoor ceremony followed a similar, yet scaled down version, of the outdoor Erstfeld ritual, and was coordinated by German director…

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I recently took a five-day trip to California to attend a memorial service for my late mother.  Two of those days were spent in airports and on airplanes.  I flew United Airlines.  My destination was Santa Barbara, California, and I began my trip in Syracuse, New York.  There is no direct flight from Syracuse to Santa Barbara, so I necessarily made the trip by legs.  The longest leg on the way out was Chicago-to-Los Angeles and on the way back, San Francisco to Dulles.  United’s feeder-lines handled the shorter flights.  The two long flights were United Airlines flights. (more…)

IN the June issue of Culture Wars magazine, E. Michael Jones, author of Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury, to mention just one of his many outstanding books, writes about the Trump Phenomenon, as seen from his hometown of South Bend, Indiana.

It’s an essentially positive view of Trump’s economic nationalism. On Trump’s casino bankruptcies, for example, Jones states:

If Donald Trump had crammed down Goldman Sachs the way he crammed down the claims of the creditors to [Atlantic City’s] failed casinos, the world would be a better place, and the United States of America would have $4 trillion dollars to spend on something other than usury payments to the wealthy.

Later, he writes:

… [The] point which Trump is now making in his inchoate, broken clock way, is that there is an intimate connection between the economy and the nation. Both entities are created by closure. The purpose of the national economy is the well-being and prosperity of all of its citizens. Any talk of an international economy is merely oligarch subterfuge for exploiting labor differentials throughout the world.

In Indiana, in May of 2016, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders paid homage to these truths by framing the issues in essentially the same way. According to the South Bend Tribune:

Sanders delivered his standard stump speech Sunday, attacking Wall Street and the “big banks” and promising campaign finance reform, free public college tuition, Medicare for all, and an end to “bad” trade policies that cost “millions” of American jobs.

Like Trump, Sanders denounced the Carrier air conditioning corporation, which “recently announced plans to move 2,100 jobs from Indianapolis to Mexi-co, where he said, workers earn ‘$3 an hour.’”20 Sand-ers denounced Carrier’s parent company United Tech-nologies as “a company that made a profit of $7 bil-lion last year. It is a company that could afford to pay its CEO over $14 in total compensation. . . . . United Technologies gave its outgoing CEO in 2014 a (sever-ance package) worth over $172 million. . . .”21

Sanders attack on Carrier drew loud boos from the audience. With the Hoosiers firmly on his side, Sanders proceeded to ruin his own message by dragging in all the sexual issues which are de rigueur for Democrats but anathema to Hoosier voters, who invariably hand the state over to the Republicans because of their aversion to them: “Everyone here understands,” Bernie said, haranguing the crowd, “what they (the Republicans) mean by family values is no woman . . has a right to control her own body. We disagree. What they mean by family values is our gay brothers and sisters do not have the right to be married. We disagree.”22

If Bernie ruined his chances of carrying Indiana in a general election by bringing up the sexual issues, Trump ruined his message by arguing for building up America’s military. And what explains the similarities? Is it simply that great minds run in the same circles? No, it’s the 5,000 people on the other side of the room. It is Demos in Indiana. Demos is anti-free trade, pro-manufacturing, pro-high wages, anti-abortion, and anti-homosexual marriage, and there is currently no party which represents their views. Nor is it clear that Hoosiers are in a position to articulate what is going on when the CEO from Sales Force parachutes into Indianapolis and demands that the state legislature change its laws to meet the specifications of the homosexual/CEO cabal that is the avant garde of oligiarch proxy warfare in our day.

One day later, Demos had spoken. Trump crushed Cruz in a lopsided 60 to 30 percent victory, guaranteeing his lock on the nomination in Cleveland in July. Cruz surprised everyone by dropping out, thereby denying himself the nomination as the oligarch’s candidate at a brokered convention. (more…)

A READER writes:

As a woman, I find such clips an embarrassment. If women are so confident, strong, and intelligent then why do they need to be puffed up?

Imagine if men did such a sexist video. (more…)

IN Creator and Creature (1856), the Rev. Frederick Faber wrote:

… There is a hell already upon earth; there is something which is excommunicated from God’s smile. It is not altogether matter, not yet altogether spirit. It is not man only, nor Satan only, nor is it exactly sin. It is an infection, an inspiration, an atmosphere, a life, a coloring matter, a pageantry, a fashion, a taste, a witchery, an impersonal but a very recognisable system. None of these names suit it, and all of them suit it. Scripture calls it, “The World.” God’s mercy does not enter into it. All hope of its reconciliation with Him is absolutely and eternally precluded. Repentance is incompatible with its existence. The sovereignty of God has laid the ban of the empire upon it; and a holy horror ought to seize us when we think of it. Meanwhile its power over the human creation is terrific, its presence ubiquitous, its deceitfulness incredible. It can find a home under every heart beneath the poles, and it embraces with impartial affection both happiness and misery. It is wider than the catholic Church, and is masterful, lawless, and intrusive within it. It cannot be damned, because it is not a person, but it will perish in the general conflagration, and so its tyranny be over, and its place know it no more. We are living in it, breathing it, acting under its influences, being cheated by its appearances, and unwarily admitting its principles. Is it it not of the last importance to us that we should know something of this huge evil creature, this monstrous seabird of evil, which flaps its wings from pole to pole, and frightens the nations into obedience by its discordant cries? (more…)