I HAVE another serious tooth infection, which is why I have not been posting much. The results have made me wonder how much refined sugar and other processed foods have contributed to my dental problems over the years. Perhaps if I could view myself as a victim, I might feel better. I happened to come across this relevant quote today in the little book, The Church and Farming by the Rev. Denis Fahey. The passage is by the French scientist Dr. Alexis Carrel from his Man, the Unknown. 

Modern Man is delicate …Medicine is far from having decreased human sufferings as much as is generally believed. It is true that the number of deaths from infectious diseases has diminished, but the deaths from degenerative diseases have increased, and the sicknesses consequent on these diseases are longer and more painful. The years of life which we have gained by the suppression of diphtheria, smallpox, typhoid fever, etc., are paid for by the long suffering and lingering deaths caused by chronic affections, and especially by cancer, diabetes, and heart disease … The maladies of the central nervous system are innumerable … Although modern hygiene has considerably prolonged the average length of life, it is very far from having done away with diseases. It has simply changed their nature .. The organism has become more susceptible to degenerative diseases … The ordinary staple foods do not contain the same nutritive substances as in former times. Mass production and commercial processing have modified the composition of wheat, eggs, milk, fruit and butter, although these articles have retained their familiar appearance … Hygienists have not paid sufficient attention to the genesis of diseases. Their studies of the modes of life and of nourishment on the physiological, intellectual and moral state of modern men are superficial, incomplete and of too short duration.

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  PUNK ROCK celebrity Patti Smith, the not-remotely-Catholic poet and singer famous for her song line "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine," will perform at the Vatican Christmas concert in December. Smith is said to have been personally invited by the Argentine Bomber (aka Pope Francis) himself. It is an apt choice, in a perverse way. The "pope" and punk rocker share the same Marxist sensibility. Here is Smith's Communist anthem, "Power to the People." It about sums up Bergoglian theology: The people rule, not God.  

IN the last ten years, the Ford Foundation has given $80 million to immigrant rights groups such as La Raza (in English The Race.) Ford is one of several major foundations that are essentially invisible rulers on the immigration issue, funding the cultural transformation of America whether the people want it or not. “Foundations are a peculiarly American institution,” wrote Joel L. Fleishman in his book The Foundation: The Great American Secret. “They have been the dynamo of social change since the beginning of last century. Yet they are cloaked in secrecy — their decision making and operations are inscrutable to the point of obscurity, leaving them substantially unaccountable.”

This is Ford’s statement of purpose on the immigration issue. As you can see, it bears little relation to reality: (more…)

  THIS parsnip and apple soup, which I recently made for my older son and a beautiful young woman he brought for dinner, would be a good first course for Thanksgiving dinner: You can, of course, do whatever you want for Thanksgiving. I don't mean to be controlling or anything (as mothers so often are). But this is a delicious possibility. Just remember to core the parsnips.

  RACIST Italian xenophobes in a Roman suburb object to the transformation of their neighborhood by an influx of Egyptians and Bangladeshis, presumably mostly Muslim, with refugee status. More than 140,000 refugees and asylum seekers have come to Italy this year alone. Many of the "refugees" paid smugglers to help them cross the Mediterranean and some were pulled from the waters by the Italian navy, as part of its rescue operation Mare Nostrum. About 3,000 migrants have died in the crossings. For more details, see this article at The Irish Times and the many posts at Refugee Resettlement Watch. In August, refugees rioted in Northern Italy, claiming they were being fed too much pasta.

AN Asian reader writes:

I feel a sense of helpless dread after reading that five million illegals are going to be given legal status next week at the stroke of a pen. I am a new citizen who did everything correctly.

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  JEANETTE V. writes: Common sense is uncommon these days. The progressives worship their idol "science" which in reality is no longer science but vile and evil propaganda that is anti-science.

  THE foolish and narcissistic practice of ripping African children from their cultural context to serve as badges of political enlightenment for Hollywood's elite finds its latest expression in the actress Charlize Theron, pictured here in the obligatory fitness attire with her rent-a-son Jackson, who is two years old and whom she is already having trouble controlling in public. Imagine her living with him ten years from now when he is a hulking teenager and she is on the latest of her glamorous boyfriends, far too old to have children or a family of her own. This is the maternal equivalent of speeding down a mountain highway in a fancy sports car, careening around the bends with eyes closed. We won't see the photos years from now of the spectacular crash. This is reckless sentimentality that is, at its core, heartless.

FROM a fascinating working paper written in 1999 by John R. Lott, Jr. and Larry Kenny of the University of Chicago Law School, who examined in detail the effects of women’s suffrage:

  THE Republicans can only win a presidential race by becoming more and more like the Democrats, while somehow signaling through image-making to their traditional supporters that they are really not like the Democrats. That is the obvious conclusion to be drawn from recent history, including the 2014 midterm elections. The recent GOP triumph was largely due to lower voter turnout among the young. See Selwyn Duke's analysis at The American Thinker.

  SOPHIA writes: I've wanted to send you a news story that I only saw reported at Life Site News and Natural News and certainly not in the mainstream media. Catholic doctors in Kenya reported that six samples of a tetanus vaccine being given to up to 2.3 million women in Kenya were found to be spiked with a chemical that induces abortion for up to three years. The latter source makes it out to be race-based genocide, but I think that's a stretch; population control is obviously not. These vaccines are being pushed by the UN and the World Health Organization.

ACCORDING to The Washington Post:

Christmas and Easter have been stricken from next year’s school calendar in Montgomery County. So have Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.

Montgomery’s Board of Education voted 7 to 1 Tuesday to eliminate references to all religious holidays on the published calendar for 2015-2016, a decision that followed a request from Muslim community leaders to give equal billing to the Muslim holy day of Eid al-Adha.

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  IT'S interesting that feminists have so often condemned the art traditions of the West for their supposed exclusion of women artists of genius even though those traditions produced millions of enchantingly beautiful realistic portraits of women, filled with character and depth. Do feminists in academia or the art world express any revulsion for the depiction of women by modern artists even when it dehumanizes them? I am not aware of any. As E. Michael Jones writes in Degenerate Moderns, perhaps with a touch of overstatement: "Picasso's mutilations of the female body bespeak the modern version of human sacrifice; they presage simultaneously in a visual way the concentration camp, the abortion clinic, and the pornographic film, and may well have helped pave the way for all three." In his private life, Picasso frequently became infatuated and then disgusted with the objects of his infatuation, such as the photographer Dora Maar, who was the subject of, "Weeping Woman," above. In addition to his Cubist portraits, he created realistic images of the women discarded, such as the pencil drawing below of Maar, but these are not the pictures for which he is most famous. It's not surprising that Picasso's pictures of spliced and hacked female faces were acclaimed and found an enthralled audience given the simultaneous rise of feminine self-loathing.

  AN ITALIAN CATHOLIC has posted a petition online, addressed to the "Cardinals of the Roman Church," requesting the removal of the phony-baloney Marxist "Pope Francis" from the papacy. The elegantly-worded petition states: [I]t remains a theological truth of the divine law and ecclesiology, that no one who seeks to harm the Church in anything essential, such as Her fidelity to Christ's Magisterium, can be in communion with Her ...  Any such act by the Modernist cardinals to depose Francis is extremely unlikely (and the Cardinals do not have the authority to depose a pope.) In the meantime, Jorge Bergoglio is not, by virtue of his defection from the Faith, the pope. He is an impostor, who continues his revolutionary agenda at a breathtaking pace, with his wacky homilies denying the existence of God and extolling evolution and dictatorial decrees against Catholics such as the excommunication of anyone who receives sacraments from the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X. As a commenter at one blog put it, "all the kooks and idiots are crawling out of the woodwork to jump into the lap of this pope." Here's one example.

THE New York City Fire Department may have found a way to achieve sexual equality.

The solution is to pretend men are women.

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CHRISTOPHER WHITE writes:

A recent essay in The New York Times tells the story of a lesbian couple in Brooklyn who used the sperm of one of their friends in California to conceive their son.

By happenstance, the sperm donor and his wife became pregnant shortly thereafter, and the writer cheerfully claims that it was their Californian friends’ willingness to serve as a donor that brought about good karma in the birth of their own child—or as the title of column states, “It Was in Giving That They Received.”

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