AFTER making this video, Dr. Anne McCloskey, who has practiced medicine for over 30 years in Londonderry, Ireland, was suspended by a local medical board and cannot practice medicine while a full investigation is completed.  

"WE must trust with a special trust all that belongs to God, or looks like Him. Our trust must be incessant, universal, prudent, and bold. In divine things there is no prudence which is not bold. It must live and work in the dark, as briskly as in the light. It must distrust itself. It must be gay, playing blithely with difficulties; for difficulties are the stones out of which all God's houses are built. Of a truth our whole generosity with God is nothing more than the measure of our confidence in Him. To sum it up in one word, in the pursuit of sanctity confidence is progress." --- The Rev. William Frederick Faber, "Confidence the Only Worship"  

A READER sends a post from Banned Hipster, who writes:

Personally, again, just for the record: I am not now, nor have I ever been, a right-winger. I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I’m never been dumb enough to fall for that scam. Right-wingers are knuckle-dragging morons with a perfect, 100% track record of losing every single battle with the left and failing to conserve anything, even the women’s restroom.

F*** right-wingers. Also, f*** Z-Man and Jim Donald, morons who don’t know jack shit about most things but are simply tied to a ridiculous ideology that is hardly all that different than various leftist ideologies. All they engage in is right-wing virtue signaling – Jim Donald’s entire output is purity spiraling, which is just hysterical, as he sees that in everyone on the left, but never seems to notice it even in his own writing and commenting. What an astonishing lack of self-awareness from these not really “dissident” right-wingers.

I don’t read the writers Banned Hipster mentions above, but I second his sentiments about conservatives and can attest to what he says, though I have in the past been dumb enough to fall for some of these cons. Right-wingers hate the truth. So do those “traditionalists” who bury lies in a mountain of pseudo-intellectual sophistries and cater to morons. Right-wingers have a cult-like mentality. They have dragged this nation to the ground with their refusal to cope with reality and truth or their actual complicity. Hipster also writes:

I’ve found 9/11 truth is an almost completely 100% reliable indicator of people who have a clue, and people who do not. The anti-truthers are all invested in one idea, and that is, facts, reality, evidence, observation, none of that matters, because they can “prove” something simply via words. “I write this sentence, therefore 9/11 truthers are wrong.” [Emphasis added.]

My favorite was always, “someone would have talked!” I mean, literally scores of people have talked they just didn’t get broadcast on TV, so you’ve never heard of any of them.

All of what they are doing is called “thought-terminating cliches.” E. Michael Jones is particularly bad about this. He rejects physical reality in favor of language. He also simply hates white people, hates America, and believes whatever the Vatican tells him to believe, because he’s a textbook religious fanatic. [TTH comment: Jones is wittingly or unwittingly a Kremlin shill.]

Anyone who believes in the official narrative of 9/11 at this point is either guilty of such extreme mental sloth that his opinions on anything happening in the world can be disregarded or he is a disinformation agent. The very laws of physics and gravity are against him — and these laws cannot be altered by moronic right-wingers no matter how holier-than-thou they are.

[Thanks to Steve.] (more…)

ALAN writes:

Not long ago I learned of the death last year of a woman whom we met in 1965.  She, her husband and her parents owned a four-family flat on Pennsylvania Avenue in south St. Louis.  All of them lived there.  We moved there in August 1965.  It turned out that we could not have chosen a residence owned and cared for by better people.  They were German, and they exemplified the spirit and determination of the “Scrubby Dutch” of south St. Louis.

Pennsylvania Avenue is a brick street.  It was a clean, safe neighborhood in 1965 and for years after.  We would never have moved there had it not been.  It was within walking distance of schools, churches, parks, and stores.  It was one block from the building that had been Maryville College.

Our years in that house left many priceless memories.

The woman who died was the last of the four. Elisabeth and her husband, Hans, had a son whom I remember from those years as being a few years younger than me. (more…)

  TO PROTEST against vaccine passports, French eat on the ground outside restaurants requiring them.  

JUSTIN TRUDEAU, puppet dictator of Communist Canada, wades through constituents in British Columbia. Listen to the comments. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. Trudeau is a snake slithering through the grass. He reads a script every day and fulfills plans that have been in place for many years.  

READ the latest entry requirements for concerts of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra here. (more…)

IT’S BEEN a while since we visited Chester.

You remember Chester — the small industrial city on the rat-gray Delaware River, the city in Pennsylvania where my husband grew up back in the day when America had small industrial cities.

I haven’t been able to go there lately — I don’t mean physically, but mentally. I feel almost ashamed to go there.

For all their faults, and Chesterites had many faults, they were not all that afraid of death. I don’t think they would have identified with a war against an invisible enemy. I don’t think they would have identified with a war against the common cold.

You might even say they courted death. They tempted it with cigarettes and beer and bad food and toothless grins.

Take the neighbor next door, Mrs. Weiry (pronounced “Weery”) — to mention one minor example.

She played on the train tracks when she was a girl. She lost her legs doing it. Both of them, below the knees. She had two wooden legs for the rest of her life. All for a day of fun on the train tracks. (more…)

EVERY day, at this time of year, hummingbirds appear in our backyard — just a few ruby-throated hummingbirds, not the hordes this blackberry farmer attracted to his fields.

Hummingbirds are extremely popular creatures, but we don’t entice them to our yard with feeders. They just appear, spending less than a minute at a time but coming many times during the course of the day, whirring and hovering, drilling with their fantastic, needle-shaped beaks into the tubular salvia blossoms and other flowers, taking away with their speedy, trademark sips the nectar that sustains them or grabbing a few barely visible insects.

For many years the hummingbirds were afraid of us and as soon as we walked out the back door they would fly away in a flash. Now we can stand a few inches away and they don’t flee. I don’t know why this is. I assume different birds come each year, but then hummingbirds can live as long as nine years, so perhaps it is possible, after traveling thousands of miles from Central America in the spring, they come back to the same yard — and have gotten used to us. I don’t know whether this is possible. I only know I can now stand close to them, look right into their jet black eyes, see the details of their emerald backs and iridescent, red or white throats — and hear the whirring of their wings, which move so fast they cannot be seen by the human eye and make the birds appear as if suspended in air. When I’m weeding, I sometimes hear the tiny, humming motors passing very close to my ears. They don’t seem to mind my presence. Maybe some hummingbirds are just not as fearful as others. (more…)

JEFF GREEN analyzes a recent piece in the news that advocates forcing the "unvaccinated" to pay for damages. This is a rant, but a good one.  

WHEN I WAS in my thirties, I began to read books differently. I felt a bit guilty about doing things this way, but, what the heck, no one was looking over my shoulders. I didn’t have anyone to please when it came to reading but myself.

I would pick up a book and check out the title page. Then, as long as it was non-fiction, I would go right to the end. I would read some of the very last chapter, usually a few paragraphs or, if interested, a few pages.

I would then go to the middle of the book, and read a few pages or paragraphs. After that, I would read the table of contents and scan the entire book quickly, with my thumb on the edge of the pages, and stop here and there, looking at chapter headings and random paragraphs. Maybe I would stop for a while in one place.

Finally, I would read some of the beginning. If the book seemed worth reading, I would later start from the very beginning and read the book in the conventional way, from start to finish.

To this day, I start many books at the end, whether they are digital or hard versions.

This method is very similar to one described by the late Mortimer Adler in his book How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading, which I later encountered and which made me realize that it was okay to do things this way with certain types of books. (more…)