The Dream of the Candle

A Tale from the Golden Legend 
By Jacobus de Voragine, A.D. 1275

We read an example of a noble lady which had great devotion in the blessed Virgin Mary, and she had a chapel in which she did do say mass of our Lady daily by her chaplain. It happed that the day of the purification of our Lady, her chaplain was out, so that this lady might that day have no mass, and she durst not go to another church because she had given her mantle unto a poor man for the love of our Lady. She was much sorrowful because she might hear no mass and for to make her devotions she went into the chapel, and tofore the altar she kneeled down for to make her prayers to our Lady.

And anon she fell asleep, in which she had a vision, and her seemed that she was in a church, and saw come into the church a great company of virgins, tofore whom she saw come a right noble virgin crowned right preciously. And when they were all set each in order, came a company of young men which sat down each after other in order like the other; after, entered one that bare a burden of candles, and departed them to them above first, and so to each of them by order he gave one, and at the last came this man to this lady aforesaid and gave to her also a candle of wax.  (more…)

  TODAY is the ancient holiday of Candelmas, which takes place on the Feast of the Purification and once represented the closing of the Christmas season. From Fish Eaters: Today is a day of purification, renewal, and hope. On this day, exactly 40 days after Christmas, we commemorate Mary's obedience to the Mosaic law by submitting herself to the Temple for the ritual purification, as commanded in Leviticus: Leviticus 12:2-8 Speak to the children of Israel, and thou shalt say to them: If a woman having received seed shall bear a man child, she shall be unclean seven days, according to the days of separation of her flowers. And on the eighth day the infant shall be circumcised: But she shall remain three and thirty days in the blood of her purification. She shall touch no holy thing: neither shall she enter into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification, be fulfilled. But if she shall bear a maid child, she shall be unclean two weeks, according to the custom of her monthly courses, and she shall remain in the blood of her purification sixty-six days. And when the days of her purification are expired, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring to the door of the tabernacle of the testimony, a lamb of a year old for a holocaust, and a young pigeon or a turtle for sin, and shall deliver them to the priest: Who shall…

WHEN a corporate plutocrat in charge of one of the largest propaganda companies in the world urges people to give their entire lives to their jobs, to “lean in” as she likes to put it, shouldn’t people be just a tad suspicious of her motives? Is it possible that the marginalization of leisure and the family just might be in her interests?

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of bestselling Lean In, has been pushing the gender revolution for years and she gets more and more ridiculous as she goes. Here she is at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the oligarchy meets to wage psychological warfare against families and nations and to promote the global triumph of the debt-finance system. (Do you believe there is even such a thing as the World Economic Forum!? What chutzpah these people have! Seriously, they can’t even disguise their blatant intentions for world control.) From Sandberg:

“We assign our chores to our children in the United States, and it can be worse in other parts of the world… The boys are taking out the trash, it takes less time than cleaning the dishes and they get bigger allowances. We start out in our homes with these very different expectations and the time spent on these tasks is incredibly important.”

She went on:

It doesn’t stop there: “Mothers will systematically overestimate their sons’ crawling, and underestimate their daughters’.”

I’m sorry to be cynical, but I believe the ridiculousness of these remarks is calculated. It is calculated to get attention and cause discussion and petty strife. Conflict and emotional disagreements keep the people from wondering why the heck anyone is listening to this billionaire slave driver in the first place.

The war against male and female, against little boys who take out the trash (as if there were any of those in America), is a war against the financial sovereignty of nations and families. It’s a war against the home and the homeland. When the home becomes a sea of divided loyalties, when the homeland is all conflict, the people are citizens of nowhere and accept their bondage to unseen, mystical financial forces, such as those represented at Davos. Their loyalty is to the Firm and its partner, the collectivist utopia.

Capitalism and Communism are two sides of the same coin. They destroy traditional culture and replace it with the rule of money.

I would just like to say one more thing. Sheryl Sandberg is a megalomaniac. (more…)

  SOME Youtube analysis of the Robert "LaVoy" Finicum shooting in Oregon. Finicum's actions and the filming of the event are suggestive of stagecraft. Was this a case of manufactured dissent?

A LONG article by Ellen Barry in The New York Times examines efforts by male elders in a small Indian village to keep some women from working in local factories. It’s an interesting, meticulously-reported piece, an exposé of primitive patriarchy in a small corner of the world where the misogynistic men would rather be poor than have their women leave home for paying jobs in smelly factories.

These men are clearly doomed.

The women in dispute had previously earned money by begging. They accept jobs in meat-packing factories. The ringleader of the group is a model of feminine affability, just the sort of woman the Times envisions as modernizing this backward land.

Geeta, the younger of the two, was born angry. Even as a child, if her siblings took her portion of food, she was apt to throw everyone’s dinner into the dirt. “A real bastard-woman,” one neighbor called her, eyes widening with admiration.

“Let their ladies sit and cook for them,” Geeta would hiss to her friend Premwati, as they walked together past their neighbors. “Our husbands are with us.”

[…]

“Her husband is like a chicken — if she tells him to get up, he will get up!” chuckled the chief in the town where she grew up.

I bet she’s a good cook too.

The village has traditionally looked down on women working side by side with strange men. One of the male elders orders that the women be shunned and everyone in the village complies. Much drama results, the sort of thing that could only occur in a place where, bizarrely, everyone knows everyone else.

The Times does not like the fact that the labor force participation rate of women in India has fallen (it now stands at a low 27 percent).  (more…)

ZIPPY CATHOLIC writes:

These links to some of my views and explanations may be pertinent to your readers when considering the issues of money and lending/credit.

I explain what fiat money is here and here. I explain why fiat dollars are (counterintuitively) more transparent and honest than gold backed dollars here. I explain why currency debasement is immoral here. I explain that banks only ‘create money’ because of usury here, where I include an explanation of why non-usurious bank loans do not involve ‘creation of money.’ And I explain what usury is and is not here.

Unsurprisingly, the core problem is usury: an execrable and really rather simple to understand sin which the Church had condemned in a full-throated manner consistently for millennia up until the mid 1800’s.  Usury only started to seem obscure and difficult to understand to many people by the late middle ages, because of propaganda which confused very different sorts of contracts and property arrangements all under the single equivocal term “loan.” (more…)

ANGELA writes:

Do you get tired of the insinuation that our country’s economic problems are a result of the individual greed of Americans? What is wrong with having a house and a car and an occasional vacation? I found that even a camping trip is very expensive! Would someone say a person was greedy because he went camping for a week? And yet that can amount to more than a thousand dollars if you have a family and want to go somewhere nice. Why should any American want to live in an unsafe house and drive a broken down car? In the end, the price is often still very high! I do not think it is greed to want a new couch or to remodel your house.

There was a man from Europe who visited us once who said all he heard back home was how greedy Americans were. Yet after being here awhile, all he saw was how hard they worked, and how polite they were compared to his country. He said even the women at home were always on their feet, working. (more…)

  DON'T watch this with children in the room!

CAN THE skateboard mass be far behind? More here. (more…)

    ASH WEDNESDAY is less than two weeks away, which means the happiness of Easter Sunday is nine weeks away. We should prepare for Lent now. Sloth is part of human nature. Self denial wouldn't be self denial if it came naturally. Dr. Thomas Droleskey writes at Christ or Chaos:  We must start thinking about our Lenten resolutions now, gradually withdrawing ourselves from the "rush" and the "pull" of the world. Ash Wednesday will be here in but a blink of an eye. And, our lives will be over in the blink of an eye too. We have only so long to express our love for God and sorrow for our sins in this vale of tears. Here are the Seven Penitential Psalms in Latin and English, a small part of the ancient liturgical treasury of aids to remorse. Penance is different from wallowing in guilt. It is the transformation of guilt into love.

A COMMENTER at Fellowship of the Minds writes: If you go back through all the various video clips of Ammon Bundy and co. at the Malheur wildlife refuge [in Oregon], you will notice that they were all dressed like regular working men. They are not/were not “militiamen” nor did they ever claim to be - with the exception of Ryan Payne. The media started calling the peaceful protesters at the Malheur wildlife refuge “militants,” “armed militants,” “militiaman,” “armed militiamen,” “terrorists,” “armed terrorists,” “armed protesters,” etc. The leftist-(mostly)-media did this to demonize, marginalize, and de-humanize the protesters, the media’s goal was to make the protesters appear to be crazed fanatics intent on overthrowing the government, taking control of the area, etc, etc. The protesters were nothing even remotely like a militia.

FROM Brandon Martinez at Non-Aligned Media:

A new, Hollywood-caliber video just released by Islamic State’s media arm al-Hayat appears to at least partially confirm the official narrative of the Paris attacks. [Editor: Links to the videos omitted.]

The video shows eight of the alleged Paris attackers delivering their final statements before gruesomely decapitating various prisoners in orange jumpsuits. Unlike previous beheading videos featuring ‘Jihadi John,’ the latest snuff film does not cut out before the actual murders take place, but displays in full bloodcurdling gory detail the sequential killings, some in slow motion.

The video was obviously shot before the IS militants ostensibly departed for their terror mission in Paris, which they state in the video was personally ordered by IS “caliph” Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi, a former Camp Bucca detainee who was oddly “on good terms” with US military authorities during his stay at the American prison in Iraq.

The twisted video opens with a statement by Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged “mastermind” of the Paris operation, in a house in an unknown location. The rest of the video appears to have been shot somewhere in Iraq or Syria, probably near one or both of IS’s strongholds, Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. The Paris attackers that do appear in the video are listed as follows: Abdel Hamid Abaaoud, Brahim Abdeslam, Omar Ismail Mostefai, Samy Amimour, Bilal Hadfi, Ali al-Iraqi, Ukashah al-Iraqi, Chakib Akrouh and Abu Fuad al-Faransi.

While the video significantly weakens the case for a MIHOP (made it happen on purpose) explanation of the Paris events, it does not disprove a LIHOP (let it happen on purpose) interpretation. A slew of forewarnings issued to French authorities before the attacks should have provided them enough signals to be able to prevent it, but strangely they did not. (more…)

THE lovely and inspiring mug of feminist Susan B. Anthony may someday adorn the $10 Federal Reserve note. This makes sense. Anthony was a prophet. In addition to her insights about bicycles, she stated the following:

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals. (more…)

I REALIZED yesterday that I have not offended my Protestant friends in quite a while. Since I do my best to offend as many different groups as possible, I offer today this strongly worded and biblically-based article on why the belief that the Bible is the source of all Christian truth (sola scripture) does not make sense. For one, this belief is not found in the Bible.

BERT PERRY writes in response to this entry on our monetary system and usury:

It strikes me that if we want to fight the current banking system and reduce usury, we really need to little more than look in the mirror. As the eminent economist Walter Williams has noted, two minimum wage incomes get a family of four out of poverty, so if a person is employable and gets married before having children, he’s not going to be poor in our country.

What’s going on here is not the Dickensian exploitation of workers, company stores, and the like, but rather people who are old enough to contract marriage, have children, get jobs, and the like, are led astray by covetousness. They want the more prestigious school, the nicer car, the bigger house, the bigger wardrobe, etc..

You want to put the kibosh on our financial system? There is an easy way to do it in our fractional reserve banking system; pay off your debts. Taking a dollar out of savings to pay off debt eliminates ten to twenty dollars in the money supply due to fractional reserve requirements. And to pay off your debts, you’ve got to confront your tendency to covet things, as Dave Ramsey would point out.

So your key issue here is not Deuteronomy 23:30, but rather Exodus 20:17. (more…)

MAJOR Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879-1952) was an Anglo-Scottish engineer who was a major advocate of monetary reform in the 20th century. He invented the theoretical system known as “social credit economics,” which is basically a proposed means for ending the privatization of credit. An introduction to social credit can be found here.

The purpose of this post is not to advocate for his theory or discuss it at length, but to offer these notes for a speech “Money: An Historical Survey,”  which he gave in 1936. They are still applicable today. The crisis he identifies is even worse now than it was then. He wrote:

I find it incredible that a stable society can persist founded on the most colossal lucrative fraud that has ever been perpetrated on society.

It is one of the tragedies of this fraud upon society that the control of credit and the control of information in all its forms – education, publicity, etc. – are concentric and interdependent, and it is obvious that the primary use which is made by the financial hierarchy of this control of information is to mould public opinion into channels which will buttress the usurped authority and hypnotise whole communities into asking for what they do not want.

Here is a fuller excerpt from the speech: (more…)

TWO investigative journalists who made undercover videos of Planned Parenthood employees discussing the trafficking in body parts have been indicted on felony charges in Texas. Instead of Planned Parenthood being charged, the investigators have been. Here’s the question: “So how could [the journalists] be liable for trying to buy human organs when nobody was liable for trying to sell them?” The answer is: This ruling makes no sense. It is draconian political censorship.

Lifesite News reports:

The lead investigator behind the undercover Planned Parenthood videos faces up to 20 years in prison after a Houston grand jury decided on Monday not to charge Planned Parenthood with any wrongdoing – and instead indicted him for offering to purchase human organs from the abortion provider.

Center for Medical Progress lead investigator David Daleiden faces a second-degree felony charge of “tampering with a governmental record,” and a misdemeanor charge for violating the state’s “prohibition of the purchase and sale of human organs.” (more…)