PAUL C. writes:

Regarding your entry on “Olympic Decadence,” you might have read that the 2024 Olympic Torch Relay included a Pentecost Sunday stop at the Lourdes Sanctuary this May.

From the shrine’s official announcement: “The Olympic flame passed through the Sanctuary of Lourdes today, the day of Pentecost. A symbolic date for pilgrims who also celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit on earth and on the Apostles, thus laying the cornerstone of our Church.”

As I’m sure you know, the flame tradition began with the ancient Olympics where the Games were held in honor of Zeus, king of all gods. The Greeks considered the Olympic fire to be sacred, letting it burn on the altar of Hestia, virgin goddess of hearth and home. In our time, the flame is said to symbolize friendship among nations.

The lighting ceremony, of course, still occurs at Olympia, amid ruins of a temple devoted to Hera, queen of the gods. Women representing a high priestess and vestal virgins light the flame according to the ancient method, focusing sunlight with a parabolic mirror. The Olympic torch is then presented to the first of many relay bearers.

I think an interesting survey could be conducted among people identifying as Catholic: “What do you think of the Lourdes episode?” I imagine a scale running roughly along these lines: (more…)

"PEOPLE who are financially illiterate do not understand how net worth valuations work. Net worth is a speculative analysis that weighs several factors, the least of which is actual hard and liquid assets. It is mainly a prediction of worth over time. Trump lost ZERO money from being President and in fact gained billions through proxy relationships with entities like Jared Kushner's hedge fund and investments in big Pharma. "Trump didn't log in to check his bank balance and see billions fewer dollars one morning after becoming president. That's not how ANY of this works. He divested the bulk of his assets to his children and to corporations in which he retains an interest through clever financial tomfoolery. "Meanwhile, the citizens of this country were taken trillions deeper into debt with their dollar *ss raped in value because of his out-of-control spending during covid. "Trump gained from being President but the People LOST BIG." --- @TonyMicelliAyOh [This is not an endorsement of the Democratic Party. Wake up, your country has been pillaged by both parties.]  

"WHILE praising individualism, an American is really expected to avoid it like the plague. American protocol insists upon a danse macabre, an insane ritual of exulting in liberty and behaving with herd-like docility, whether in politics, at work or in private behavior. The inherent paradox has been seemingly resolved by insisting upon twisting individual 'creativity' to the development of vulgar advertising jingles, unisex clothing and broad, insipid, intellectual formulae for everything from philosophy to foreign policy. Those who follow the prescribed pattern are lauded as being both men of conviction as well as team players; those who reject it are either laughed off center stage or written out of polite society as being insane." --- Dr. John C. Rao, Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States of America  

"THE heroes were men who, through the aid of a carnal passion excited to its utmost, did extraordinary things. The saints are men who, subduing all carnal passions, courageously stem, unaided by any carnal assistance, the tide of all sorrows. The heroes, exciting to feverish ebullition their own powers, attacked all who opposed them. The saints always began by distrusting their own powers, and, unaided by, and deprived of, all help from them, entered on the contest at once with themselves, and all the powers of earth and hell. The heroes proposed to attain high glory and great renown among nations. The saints regarded the vain talk of human generations as nothing, cared not for renown and glory, and leaving aside their own will, as something vile, placed themselves and their all in the hands of God, regarding it as excellent and glorious to put on the livery of His servants. This is what the heroes and saints were: the one and the other attained the opposite of what they intended; for the heroes, who thought to fill the earth with the glory of their name, have fallen into profound oblivion among all peoples, whilst the saints, who only fixed their eyes on heaven, [were] honoured and reverenced here below by peoples, emperors, pontiffs, and kings." -- Juan Donoso Cortés  

(Bad Language warning)

RONIT Lentin, the Israeli who established Ireland’s first “Ethnic and Racial Studies” program, recently said the Irish people need more African immigrants to “wipe their arses” when they are old. Laura Weinstein, another Jewish academic, has similarly said that if Ireland is not open to more Third World immigrants, the Irish will become “neurotic” “inbred” “dogs.”

Read more on these and other charming figures behind the Great Replacement in Ireland. (more…)

Video link "TRUMP is an invented character. It is political theatre at best. They simply want him in because they believe the public will respond better to him in carrying out the agendas that they require to be realized."  

SCRATCH an American “patriot” and just under the surface is often a big-government liberal with deep trust in federal agencies and the mystique of the American founding.

The “patriot” is easily deceived by mass shooting hoaxes and false flags such as 9/11 because he idolizes government and just can’t accept that so many people working in government have committed treason. He believes if patriots can just get the good guys in office, everything will be okay. He willfully refuses to entertain the idea of organized deception even though it has been practiced by intelligence agencies for many years.

He may idolize the white race and not want to own up to just how corrupt many middle class whites are. Besides some of his friends may be police officers, municipal officials or work for the FBI. They’re decent people so most people in the government must be decent too. Of course, most people who work for the government are decent, but it only takes a few to pull off political theater. And when the money’s good … Many people participating in these deceptions obviously rationalize their behavior and believe they are doing good. 

Also, excuse my bluntness, but many conservatives have let their minds rot and have reduced patriotism and Christianity to childishness, fairy tales and insanity. Here’s a good example: (more…)

 TRUMP has told his followers again and again that he's a snake. Some good points here about his constant snake references. (But, hey, no one was killed in this hoax or in any of these hoaxes.)  

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RESEARCHERS have pored over images of the JFK assassination for decades, but that won't happen with the fake Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. This was too clownish and obvious. It was amateurish political theater and in-your-face mockery of a public that devours lies like sows at a trough of slops. Here's some footage of the crowd scene behind the podium. If emergency workers or police officers treated victims of a real shooting the way they treated the fake wounded in Butler, they would instantly lose their jobs. They would face possible lawsuits from family members. Their careers would be over. No EMT ever carries around the injured this way, as if they were nothing but sacks of sand: Additional footage of this Hoax was released showing off the crisis actors that were supposedly shot in the crowd. There are so many things wrong with this scene - there is zero reality present. The people in the crowd smile, wave their hands around and are pretty comfortable hanging out waiting for direction after 'bullets' were just fired. Quite honestly, I’ve seen people react with far more excitement and urgency for the hotdog and beer vendors than I see in this scene. This crowd just supposedly saw someone get shot in the head and bleed out, yet they never move. The police finally come in to tell them to get down, way after the fake gun shots were fired. The emergency…

"COMMITMENT is doing what you said you would do, after the feeling you said it in, has passed." ---- St. Camillus de Lellis  

We see, then, in looking at a chain of lofty hills, and in thinking of their perpetual waste in the service of the lowlands, that the moral and physical worlds are built on the same pattern. They represent the heroes and all-beneficent genius. They receive upon their heads and sides the larger baptisms from the heavens, not to be selfish with their riches, but to give,—to give all that is poured upon them,—yes, and something of themselves with every stream and tide.

                                                                             — Thomas Starr King

THE MOUNTAIN  is so many things at once – a geological event, a meteorological force, a region of staggered botanical zones – that it is easy to forget that it is also a metaphysical event, the object of rich and varied contemplation. Mountains are schools and cathedrals, John Ruskin wrote, and all but the most insensible minds are educated and refined by alpine experiences. Mountains are, as Ruskin put it, “full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper.” In rock and ravine, forest and crag, mountains utter spiritual truths, sermons in stone that can never be fully translated into words.

There are mountains of books about mountains. Many of these are guides about natural history, about the dwarf cinquefoil that grows on alpine slopes, the glacial erratics and krummholz, the wind patterns and ice formations that characterize the higher altitudes. Plenty of other books recount mountain adventures and feats, daring expeditions up Everest or Denali. But it is no so easy to find books about what mountains mean, about their influence on the psyche.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Thomas Starr King took to rambling through the White Mountains of New Hampshire at a time when alpine jaunts were still relatively new to Americans. The book he wrote recording his research and observations, The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape and Poetry, was a bestseller at the time it was published in 1859 and it remains, despite its occasional lapses into unrestrained rhapsody, one of the most charming meditations on the beauty and symbolism of mountains. (more…)

"VOTERS are addicts. They continue to buy what their dealers sell them. They get high on the lie and crash when reality sets in. Don't even try to reason with them because they will lash out - at YOU. The turnaround is always 'just over the horizon.' Just one more election and then it'll all be ok. "It's obvious things are bad, but lying to oneself and others is the greatest talent of the addict. "So for now, they will just buy another hit from the pushers by voting harder and trying to drag down everyone around them with their delusions ... telling themselves they can quit anytime they want, if things get bad enough. "It was never supposed to be like this. There are no political solutions because 9 out of 10 people are part of the problem." -- @TonyMicelliAyOh  

 MOST Republicans are too caught up in the afterglow of a fake assassination attempt to care about anti-Christian prayers at the GOP convention.