The Weirs

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TALES OF CHESTERmy husband’s recollections of his childhood, continues here with his memories of his neighbors, the Weirs.

Weiry, as in “weary,” that’s what we called her, had slicked-back gray hair and a face very much like Renner’s, only puffier with prominent swellings beneath the eyes. She looked like a man, and she had the most unusual walk. With every other step, her head would drop a foot or more, so that if she were walking on the other side of our hideous wooden fence, you would see her head appear and then disappear in a dolphin-like rhythm, as she walked to the end of the yard to water her tomato plants.

After the fire at Renner’s, which happened when I was ten, I began spending more time with the Weirs, who inhabited the ground-floor apartment in the red-shingled building on the north side of our house. Their place was across an alleyway that was so narrow you could shimmy up to the roof by bracing your hands and feet on the brick walls on either side. Their lives had been far different from Renner’s.

We often said that if Weiry had gone on that old TV show, Queen for a Day, she would have walked off with the studio. We watched Queen for a Day every afternoon. Three women chosen from the audience would tell horrible stories about the abject state of their lives. The audience would vote for the most-pathetic case, the results tabulated on an applause meter. They applauded hardship. The winner got crowned by the host, Jack Bailey, and received a gown and a Speed Queen washing machine.

No one we saw could match Weiry.

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From the Ruins of St. Louis

 

college-hill

ALAN writes:

 A Progress Report from St. Louis

December, 2014:  Black female, 16, shot and killed by black thug, 21, two blocks from the Catholic high school that I attended in 1964.

December, 2014:  Black thug smashes windows at “Nu Fashion Beauty” store to steal “hair extensions”.  This was a repeat performance:  One day in 2006, the two doors and large glass windows at that store were completely boarded up.

This is called “breaking down barriers,” a cultural trend vigorously promoted by Liberals, Progressives, Anarchists, Feminists, Do-Gooders, and the Socialists and Communists who call themselves “Catholics.” The point of “breaking down barriers” is to get what you want.  Blacks understand this perfectly.  That is why they “break down barriers” in the form of inconvenient windows at “Nu Fashion Beauty” and other beauty supply stores, shoe stores, and electronic entertainment stores throughout St. Louis. It is a new and improved way of shopping.

Quintessential black culture:  A store owned and run by blacks that caters to blacks is targeted for theft repeatedly by blacks.  How does that improve my old neighborhood? I want to know.    (more…)

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FBI Director Genuflects Before Noble Negro

 

FBI Director James Comey, in a speech at Georgetown in reaction to the Ferguson riots, indulges in transparent historical revisionism to excuse crimes by blacks. There is nothing original in his speech, in which he ridiculously claims that black crime is no worse than the former crimes of Irish immigrants. It’s all been said millions and millions of times, including the idea that white racism is a “hard truth.” It’s all taught every single day in high schools and colleges. Still it is noteworthy when a chief law enforcer denies the very notion of free will in law-breaking.

Do you see the logic here? If lawbreakers are not responsible for their own behavior, or at least some of them are not responsible for their own behavior, then the government is responsible for everything. Comey’s speech is just another bureaucrat’s plea for bureaucratic tyranny. That’s what racialism is about. It’s about power, not benevolence towards blacks. Comey could care less about the true welfare of blacks, who are destroyed by this country’s leniency towards crime and the fatuous insensitivity of people like Comey towards its victims. Instead, Comey demands that his underlings worship at the grave of Martin Luther King:

I am descended from Irish immigrants. A century ago, the Irish knew well how American society—and law enforcement—viewed them: as drunks, ruffians, and criminals. Law enforcement’s biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the “paddy wagon.” 
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Does Art Make Us Better?

 

THE POET and essayist Mark Anthony Signorelli examines the idea that art, particularly high culture, is not an elevating influence on human nature because some individuals who have committed great moral crimes have been either cultured people or actual artists,. He cites the example of Nazi officers who listened to Mozart.

It appears very likely to be the case that the corrosive politics of the era simply exerted such a fierce influence over that generation, that no amount of erudition or aesthetic refinement could consistently counteract it. (more…)

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A Convert Tries to Convert the “Pope”

  A CONVERT to Catholicism desperately attempts to persuade "Pope" Francis to become a Catholic. Weird, eh? Dr. Maike Hickson writes in a letter posted at Rorate Caeli: I came out of a world that is now more and more subverting and invading, if not permeating, the life of the Catholic Church and a world to which you now seem to bow down and to pander. I grew up without any faith, from a broken family, in a cohabiting, aborting, divorcing and selfish world. I did not even know fully the Ten Commandments. I certainly did not live them. Nor did I have an intact family to give me a strong identity, a safe haven, or moral guidance. This way of life led me into many an impasse and even into depression. It was when I met my future husband that the light of Christ seemed first to enter my heart, slowly but steadily. If Jorge Bergoglio officially approves divorce in the next installment of the Synod on the Family, Dr. Hickson will be required to approve it too. No Catholic can resist the pope's official teachings. Or Dr. Hickson will come to the inescapable conclusion that a non-Catholic such as Mr. Bergoglio cannot be a pope and that he is in fact an anti-pope whom Catholics must shun and reject.

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Our Lady of Lourdes

  I IN 1858, at the Massabielle Grotto in an obscure French village, Our Lady appeared to a poor girl named Bernadette Soubirous. The movie, Song of Bernadette, is historically accurate and tells the story of how Bernadette was rebuked by parents, teachers, priests and the police before her account of the apparitions was believed. The Catholic Church approved the Lourdes apparitions on June 18, 1862. Bernadette was canonized in 1933. Millions of people have traveled to Lourdes since that time and many miraculous cures have occurred. However, the real message of Lourdes is not relief from suffering, but acceptance of it. See Pope Pius XII's inspiring reflections on the apparitions of Lourdes on the occasion of the 100th anniversary in 1958. Today is the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. Pope Pius XII said: To a society which in its public life often contests the supreme rights of God, to a society which would gain the whole world at the expense of its own soul and thus hasten to its own destruction, the Virgin Mother has sent a cry of alarm.  

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Bryn Mawr Becomes Insane Asylum

 

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Rockefeller Hall at Bryn Mawr

THE INCLUSIVE women’s college must now include men. Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania has decided to accept “transgender, non-binary and gender nonconforming applicants.” (Not sure what a “non-binary” person is. Please, I don’t want to know.) According to the college news service:

In addition to those applicants who were assigned female at birth, the applicant pool will be inclusive of transwomen and of intersex individuals who live and identify as women at the time of application. Intersex individuals who do not identify as male are also eligible for admission. Those assigned female at birth who have taken medical or legal steps to identify as male are not eligible for admission.

I’m wondering: Does Bryn Mawr have a biology department? What do they do in that biology department? They certainly can’t be pursuing science in any meaningful sense. “Assigned?” No one is assigned anything. Sex is really quite obvious at birth. Scientists have noticed this for a while now.

Given that it has supported the spiritual mutilation of women for years and has wanted men to become women for years, I guess it should be no surprise that Bryn Mawr now supports the surgical and chemical mutilation of human beings and the ultimate pretense of femininity. I wonder if a student will actually be favored for admission if his parents have hired a surgeon to chop off his male organ? Well, the women at Bryn Mawr have been fantasizing about castration for decades now. They have it at last. I say the castrated male should get first pick of dorm rooms.

If the school accepts men who are pretending to be women, maybe someday it will accept bad students who are pretending to be good students. (Actually, it already does that under the banner of “diversity.”) Or middle class students who are pretending to be rich. (Actually, it already does that by saddling students with a lifetime of debt.) But who cares? Here we see yet another institution that is fundamentally unsound and can’t possibly recover and become civilized without engaging in repentance for many, many, many years for the souls and bodies it has helped destroy. In the meantime, we are living in a post-satire age, dear reader. How can you satirize insanity? P.G. Wodehouse would be an accountant if he were alive today. We are doomed to seriousness and deprived of jokes. Take it as yet another form of chastisement.

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The Reason for Diversity in Things and People

 

The Garden of Eden, Unknown German master; 1410
The Garden of Eden, Unknown German master; 1410

THE WORD “diversity” has been corrupted. It’s almost impossible to use the word today without conjuring something that is opposed to diversity, which stands for variety and multiplicity. “Diversity” to egalitarians is not diversity but its opposite: an imposed homogeneity and stifling of differences.

It’s a shame because “diversity” is a good word. All of the created order is diverse. God loves variety and differences. He could have made all people the same, but he did not. He deliberately created differences. Therefore difference must be good. There could be no other way, given the imperfections and limitations of creatures, for God to express divine goodness. St. Thomas Aquinas explains this:

[T]he multiplicity and distinction existing among things were devised by the divine intellect and were carried out in the real order so that the divine goodness might be mirrored by created things in variety, and that different things might participate in divine goodness in varying degrees. Thus, the very order existing among diverse things issues in a certain beauty, which should call to mind the divine wisdom.

[Aquinas’s Shorter Summa, Chapt. 103; Sophia Press, 1993]

This world is a celebration of diversity.

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The Racism Industry

 

IF whites are guilty of oppressing non-whites then shouldn’t journalists, academics and politicians try to prevent non-whites from entering majority-white countries instead of encouraging mass migration?

Hubert Collins addresses this question:

Leftist pundits and academics are paid to analyze, and the more turmoil there is, the more there is to analyze. The more racism is “found,” whether it be in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or Jesus Christ, the more money is to be made through books, lectures, essays, and classes that denounce racism.

All anti-racist commentators benefit from high racial tensions–real or imagined–since it is their source of income. (more…)

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Unsettled

 

DAN R. writes:

In Sunday’s New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni asks, “Do gays unsettle you?” And my answer?  Frankly, yes.

I am unsettled, first off, by the very use of the word “gay,” a corruption of a word once universally viewed in a positive light.

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Not Obama’s Ghandiji

  DEAN ERICSON writes: An excellent corrective for the idiotic adulation recently accorded Saint Mohandas Ghandi by Obama is Richard Grenier's article, published in Commentary magazine in 1983, which was inspired by Richard Attenborough's hagiographic movie on Gandhi released that year. From the piece: "But it is not widely realized how much violence... was associated with Gandhi's so called non-violent" movement from the very beginning."

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Two Peas in an Extremely Rotten Pod

 

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IT’S amazing how much a false president and a false pope can have in common. On February 5th, at the National Prayer Breakfast, Barack Hussein Obama  did such a brilliant Jorge Bergoglio imitation that one might suspect that Obama is pitching for the “pope’s” job. Why not? After all, you don’t have to be Catholic to be a papal pretender. In fact, it’s best if you’re not.

In his speech, the president, who also believes all religions are true (and thus no religions are true), said:

So how do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities — the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. (more…)

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Tales of Chester, Part I

 

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My husband as a child

 

A FRIEND told me once that he walked into a bar in North Philadelphia many years ago and noticed a crowd of people gathered in the back of the room. The crowd was standing around a young man of modest stature with red hair, listening with rapt attention to him speak. He was telling stories of his childhood.

That man was my future husband and I have listened to those stories too.

When I married 27 years ago, I didn’t just marry a man. I married a whole community. A community that no longer existed.

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Trans-Madness

 

IN THE entry on the former athlete Bruce Jenner, who believes he is a woman in a man’s body when he is, and always will be, a man in a man’s body, the reader James writes:

Don’t get me started on these so-called “sex change” operations. It is disgusting — hack doctors taking these disturbed people’s money in exchange for what is essentially elective genital mutilation. “Sex change” is impossible. It can’t be done. “Oh, I’m a woman/man now” sounds absurd. NO, you aren’t. You are now an “it,” a monster of a person. You are left with a non-functional, ruined genitalia, artificial hormones ravaging your body, and a broken mind that the brainwashed masses will tell you is completely “natural” and “normal.”

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The Path to Enlightenment in India

  I RECEIVED a long e-mail from the author E. Michael Jones that was sent to subscribers of his magazine, Culture Wars. In the message, Jones described his recent trip to India. Here is a priceless excerpt: The juxtaposition of Hindu Temple and Nehru Science center on the Mumbai bus tour was instructive. India has gone from worshipping elephants, monkeys and cobras to worshipping science, with no metaphysical experience in between. It reminds me of what George Bernard Shaw said of America: “a country that went from barbarism to decadence without finding civilization along the way.” India seems destined to become a country of cobra worshipping computer programmers.

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