ALAN writes:

I have always looked upon the late 1950s/early 1960s as a high-water mark of modern American life. I would like to cite two examples from the realm of popular entertainment that will show the contrast between then and today. Here is the first:

Sixty years ago, at the noon hour on a sunny day in August 1962, thousands of people gathered on Eighth Street in the heart of downtown St. Louis:  Office workers, shoppers, visitors, diners, and department store and specialty store employees. They did not harm anyone, shoot anybody, break any windows, or vandalize any property.  It was a peaceful assembly of civilized men and women. They were there to see and hear one man; a man who had by then become a legend in the realm of television comedy entertainment.  Jackie Gleason was there in person to speak briefly and conduct the Laclede Concert Band in a rendition of his theme song “Melancholy Serenade.”

The crowd was not “diverse” or “multicultural.” It was 99.99% white. Women wore dresses and hats. Men wore white shirts, ties, suits, and hats.  There were no blue jeans, t-shirts, ball caps, or tattoos and no men or boys with long hair.

Would that such mobs could still be seen in downtown St. Louis.

Nearly everyone there was old enough to remember the entertainment Jackie Gleason provided on his TV shows during the previous ten years. (more…)

BRUCE Charlton writes: We are tested every day by the sin of fear. And the temptation - offering a delusory escape from fear - is safety. If we compare our post 2020 world with life a few decades ago; it is clear that we are now controlled primarily by the negative sin of fear (with a side-order of spiteful resentment: the stock-in-trade of socialism, feminism, antiracism and the other leftisms). These are negative sins because they are directed-against.  

IF GOD preferred uniformity to variety, then why did He create so much thrilling diversity? He created true diversity, not the cultish, artificial “diversity” we hear about all the time.

Scientists can spend entire careers studying a single species of insects or plants.

“Estimates of the total number of insect species, or those within specific orders, often vary considerably. Globally, averages of these estimates suggest there are around 1.5 million beetle species and 5.5 million insect species, with about 1 million insect species currently found and described.” (Source)

So many different insects inhabit the world that many haven’t even been studied and named.

Do birds try to be other birds? They may eat other birds or parasitically feed on their eggs, but they don’t strive to become what they are not and no scientist has observed — ever — a fish morphing into a bird. Except when they want each other for food, animals mostly leave each other alone.

They are themselves: Humming, feeding, flying, running, jumping — an endless and marvelous diversity of life. The only effect man has had on all this enchanting diversity is to reduce it. But nature reviles him. And its diversity persists. (more…)

Acceptance --- by Robert Frost When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud And goes down burning into the gulf below, No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud At what has happened. Birds, at least must know It is the change to darkness in the sky. Murmuring something quiet in her breast, One bird begins to close a faded eye; Or overtaken too far from his nest, Hurrying low above the grove, some waif Swoops just in time to his remembered tree. At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe! Now let the night be dark for all of me. Let the night be too dark for me to see Into the future. Let what will be, be.'  

ALAN writes:

In a comparison of “free speech” in the USSR and the USA, Lev Tsitrin wrote that there is little substantive difference between restrictions placed upon such speech by the dictators of Communist Russia and the limitations placed upon it today here in the US by the sweetheart alliance of Big Government, Big Corporations, and the Mass Communications/Propaganda industry.

From their standpoint, Mr. Tsitrin concludes, “free speech that is epitomized in ‘samizdat’ [i.e., self-published writings] can — and should — be suppressed. In their mistrust of free speech, …. the US and the USSR ultimately converge.”

[Lev Tsitrin, “Free Speech in the USSR and in the US”, New English Review, August 2022] (more…)

INTERESTING observations in this video about the differences between Poland and Ireland. (more…)

IMAGINE a novel about “the end of black people.” One day the main character, a black man, wakes up and finds that his skin is white. The same thing happens to black people everywhere on earth. The character does not like being white.

Imagine this literary work, titled The Last Black Man, being celebrated by all the major publicity organs of the entire Western world, and maybe the rest of the world too. The novel is compared favorably with Franz Kafka’s bleak tale (obligatory reading for impressionable adolescents) The Metamorphosis. Some words used to describe the book:

“Deliciously ominous,” “deft,” “on-the-ground immediacy,” “transformative,” “breathless, incantatory,” “compellingly readable and strangely musical,” “strange, beautiful,”  “Sincere,” “earnest,” “peculiarly hopeful,” and more.

The New York Times prominently promotes it and proclaims that the book offers “a vision of humanity unvexed by racial animosities” because all people in the world are at last white.

Can you imagine all this? No, you can’t.

Any author who wrote a novel favorably envisioning “the last black man” would be a few legalisms away from a jail cell. The chances of his book receiving a review even in a local weekly would be nil. The only publicity he would get would come from a police report. The only photo of him that would appear would be a mugshot.

The Last White Man, however, is a real, recently published, fantastically celebrated novel, so brilliant, so “strangely musical,” it is hailed by the whole world. Its author is a Pakistani immigrant to Britain, Mohsid Hamid, who is now fantastically rich for serving up a literary vision of the destruction of one race. My local library system has eight copies, not surprising given the promotion and that suburban whites are particularly prone to the masochistic thrills of racial self-obliteration.

Interestingly, even though Hamid’s book describes the end of white people, the author is accused of a racial misdemeanor:

“we … don’t hear anything about how Black people feel about their numbers being swelled by all these dazed-and-confused involuntary converts.”

More from NPR: (more…)

"WE ought to run after crosses as the miser runs after money. Nothing but crosses will reassure us at the Day of Judgment. When that day shall come, we shall be happy in our misfortunes, proud of our humiliations, and rich in our sacrifices." -- St. John Vianney (@TempusFugit4016)  

   ONLY smart people could believe in something so astonishingly dumb.  

THOUSANDS and thousands of books have been written about the American Civil War, more accurately called the “War Between the States,” and vast legions of scholars have spent their entire careers immersed in it. Ordinary people have also devoted immense, independent labor to studying it. Gee, it’s intimidating to discuss. I am not remotely an expert, not even one of those highly informed amateurs. Let’s say, I’m an amateur’s amateur.

But it interests me. And it’s important to discuss it.

The War Between the States led to an oppressive form of federal government that remains with us today. The ongoing rhetoric about the war is deliberately inflammatory, unnecessarily divisive and involves systematic defamation of Southerners. It distracts from today’s entrenched, despotic system of debt slavery, a bondage shared by black and white. We are living everyday in the war’s aftermath. I plan to highlight intermittently some myths about the conflict as food for thought and as inspiration for your further study. I remain open to correction. Bear in mind, the American Founding itself, despite many noble principles and provisions, established a form of secular government that was not ideal, based as it was on rationalistic, “Enlightenment” ideas.

It is often said that the South started the war. According to this view, the South was the aggressor, first, by seceding from the United States and, secondly, by firing on Fort Sumter near Charleston in 1861.

Was the South unwise in seceding? Probably it was, given the outcome of the war. But it had every right to do so under the terms of the Constitution, which established the united states not the united state. The Founders deliberately avoided the word “national” in the founding documents, preferring federal. They were establishing a federation of sovereign entities. The federal government was not authorized by the Constitution to prevent states from leaving.

As Philip Mericle writes in a review of Adam Miller’s books on the war, which I highly recommend: (more…)

"WHAT our country, — indeed, what every Christian country under the sun, — needs most, are these great-souled wives, mothers, and sisters in the dwellings of our over-burdened laborers; women for whom the roof above them and the four walls which enclose their dear ones are the only world they care to know, the little paradise which they set their hearts on making pleasant, sunny, and fragrant for the husband who is out in the hot sun or the bitter cold, beneath the pelting of the rain or the snow or the sleet, who, poorly clad and shod, with his scanty fare of hard bread and cold tea, is working away for the little home and the wife and babes, and who is singing in his heart as he bethinks him of the warm welcome that awaits him when the long day is over, of the bright smile and the loving words that will be sure to greet him when he crosses the threshold of his own little Eden, of the cheerful fire in winter and the humble meal made so delicious by the love that prepares it and the sweet words that season it, of the rest and the security and the peace which force the over-flowing heart of the husband and father and brother to think and to say that there is no spot of earth so dear and so blessed as the little sanctuary built up and…

I SAW a homemade billboard along the Pennsylvania Turnpike the other day. It said: "Normal" is not coming back. Jesus is.  

 "PERFECTION is founded entirely on the love of God: “Charity is the bond of perfection;” and perfect love of God means the complete union of our will with God’s: “The principal effect of love is so to unite the wills of those who love each other as to make them will the same things .” It follows then, that the more one unites his will with the divine will, the greater will be his love of God. Mortification, meditation, receiving Holy Communion, acts of fraternal charity are all certainly pleasing to God — but only when they are in accordance with his will. When they do not accord with God’s will, he not only finds no pleasure in them, but he even rejects them utterly and punishes them. "To illustrate:—A man has two servants. One works unremittingly all day long— but according to his own devices; the other, conceivably, works less, but he does do what he is told. This latter of course is going to find favor in the eyes of his master; the other will not. Now, in applying this example, we may ask: Why should we perform actions for God’s glory if they are not going to be acceptable to him? God does not want sacrifices, the prophet Samuel told King Saul, but he does want obedience to his will: “Doth the Lord desire holocausts and victims, and not rather that the voice of the Lord…