MURDER RATES and gun violence have increased significantly in major American cities. The New York Times reports:

And as The New York Times reported recently: “It has been nearly a quarter century since New York City experienced as much gun violence in the month of June as it has seen this year.” (On Sunday, there were at least nine killings in the city.)

An additional 11 cities provide year-to-date murder data. Murder is up 21.8 percent in all 36 cities with 2020 data through at least May, with 29 of those cities seeing an increase this year relative to last year.

The Times piece is a classic example of lying by omission.

Nowhere does it mention that the overwhelming majority of victims are blacks, who’ve been killed by other blacks. Six children, all of them black, were killed in shootings in various cities over the July Fourth weekend, including 11-year-old Davon MacNeal. The group of five men who “began shooting” in his vicinity Saturday night were most certainly not “white supremacists:”

News stories about the rise in crime often speak of it as mysterious and perplexing, or attribute it to the virus shutdown alone, rather than the open promotion of criminality by the government, media and corporations in their support for the corporate-and-foundation funded, Communist insurrection group, Black Lives Matter.

What’s driving the rise? No one really knows yet, and short-term swings can turn out to be blips. “This is such a weird year in so many dimensions, and it’s going to take us a while to figure out what caused any of these differences…,” one crime expert told the authors. (Source)

No one really knows.

“Black Lives Matter” is an open lie.

IN DECEMBER of 2018, I wrote of Meredith, one of my oldest friends who was diagnosed five years ago at the age of 57 with “Early-Onset” Alzheimer’s Disease.

Since Meredith became sick, we spent many happy times together, walking in the woods, traveling once together to Charleston, South Carolina (where we pretended we were real Southern ladies) for a vacation, window shopping, having lunch and just sitting quietly listening to music or talking, mostly about the people she loved. We had little mishaps and adventures, such as the time I started to take off her jacket in a restaurant because she was warm and discovered she was wearing nothing underneath or the time she collapsed on a busy sidewalk and kind people appeared out of nowhere to help me get her back to my house or the time I lost her at a busy public garden at Christmas. She used to refer to her disease jokingly as “WISE-enheimer’s” and I would say that she was giving it to me. Getting her into the passenger seat of the car was sometimes an adventure in itself because she was easily disoriented spatially. So if she couldn’t drop into the seat, we would circle around the car and approach it again, like a plane coming in for a rough landing. If she still couldn’t make that scary drop, we would stop and circle around again until she had a sense of where she was.

She was extremely affectionate and openly grateful for the little things we did together. Every day, she experienced moments of intense sadness and anguish, but the clouds would pass. This photo of her was taken in March.

Like everyone else, Meredith lived in crushing social isolation during the last four months. Not “alone together,” but alone apart. The isolation was worse, I think, for someone like her because she could not talk on the phone or use the computer or participate in the arithmetical thrills of a wildly exaggerated pandemic. Zoom or online cultural events could not have possibly met her great need for human contact. As her mind declined, nothing mattered to her, but people — the real thing. I remember once she walked up to a man in our favorite consignment store, looked him straight in the face with blazing astonishment and said, “You are beautiful! I want to marry you!” He burst out laughing,. “I bet women tell you that all the time,” I said. I cannot conceive of her navigating a sea of masks. It’s too horrible to contemplate. Like small children, she looked you straight in the eye with all-encompassing absorption. She was avid for faces. And like small children, she saw, with piercing discernment, beauty in faces others couldn’t see.

Starting in March, she was confined to her home, seeing only her warm, devoted husband and an aide, no visitors allowed. She deteriorated dramatically and during the last three weeks was unable to walk much or eat solid food. She died Sunday after a heart attack in her living room and after days of “inconsolable anguish.” On the very same day she died, her first grandchild was born — in a hospital where visitors were prohibited, the generations passing in the night in a hyper-sterile, depopulated landscape.

I could not have asked for a more precious friend. Read More »

Chadds Ford Landscape, N.C. Wyeth

‘I GIVE all to my country, because I owe all to it. My country was first in giving. To its soil, to its sky I owe the bread which nourishes my body, and the wine which gladdens my heart, the azure sky and the dreams which have delighted my soul. In the language of my homeland I lisped the first words which faltered on my infant tongue, and named all the objects which charmed my youth. In the fields and woods of my native land, along the shores of its lakes and rivers, I gathered flowers which lent fragrance to my childhood. My own heart was molded on the heart of my country. In it and through it my home exists together with its treasures, sweet memories and rich traditions. To defend, save, and perpetuate all this, to the end that every family will be able to continue to expand itself in a shielded, intact and flourishing country I am ready to work, to struggle, and, if necessary, to die.

“I must be prepared for this in peace as well as in war, in sorrow as well as in joy. The moment the welfare of my country is at stake and my personal cooperation is demanded, nothing will justify my lack of loyalty. My personal misfortunes, my most secret heartbreaks, should not prevent the placing of my abilities and skill at the disposal of the fatherland.”

—- Marguerite Duportal, A Key to Happiness (Bruce Publishing Co, Milwaukee; 1943. Transl. Romuald Pecasse)

FROM a 2017 article by Cliff Kincaid at Tradition in Action:

One of my duties at Accuracy in Media (AIM) has been to expose left-wingers in the media and Congress who were soft on the old Soviet Union and are now acting like hard-liners on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It is a fascinating topic that exposes the duplicity of the left-wing obsession with Russia.

These people, who were soft on the Soviet Union and now hard on Russia, are the worst kind of hypocrites. Their hypocrisy is further demonstrated by the abundant evidence that the global warming or climate change theory, which they now embrace, was conceived by Soviet communists as a means by which to destroy the industrial base in the United States. This disinformation theme has been embraced by the liberals now claiming to be tough on Russia.

Don’t take my word for it. When Natalie Grant Wraga died in 2002 at the age of 101, The Washington Post recognized her expertise as a Soviet expert, noting that she was “born in czarist Russia, saw great upheaval in her native land and became an expert in unmasking Soviet deception methods for the State Department…”

But the Post would not admit that fact in today’s political climate.

The liberal Economist magazine wrote, “She was perhaps the only person alive in the West who could claim such an intimate knowledge of Russian political thinking, from tsarist times to the collapse of the Soviet Union.” She commented, “Many people are studying the past, but very few are studying the present. Keep your eyes open and your ears open.”

This is good advice. One of the great Soviet/Russian deceptions, Wraga wrote, was the idea that humans were changing the climate and that humans could save the earth through socialism. She said, “Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West.”

Read more.

A READER writes:

I used the card provided by The Healthy American website and read aloud at the entrance of a store where one of their lackeys was forbidding unmasked people service. He motioned for me to go in the store. A very young couple found me in the store and said “Ma’am you are brave!” They said they didn’t believe in the virus. I gave them some of the cards. Read More »

VLADIMIR PUTIN has signed an executive order allowing him to be president until 2036. Preparing the way for him to become a world dictator?

It’s staggering that many American patriots consider a man who is actively working for the destabilization of this country to be a Christian figure superior to American leaders. Read More »

IN HIS book “The Secret Destiny of America,” Manly P. Hall (1901-1990), a writer and mystic deeply sympathetic to ideas of American exceptionalism and the work of secret societies in creating a utopian nation dedicated to the perfection of man, claimed an unknown man — an angel? — motivated the Signers of the Declaration of Independence on July 4,1776 to overcome their fears and sign the document. Hall described at length the words of the angel in his book The Secret Destiny of America.

The problem is, this story has no basis in the historical record. Anna Berkes writes:

This story is a work of historical fiction. It appeared in George Lippard’s Washington and His Generals; Or, Legends of the Revolution.1 According to American National Biography, Lippard “wrote many semifanciful ‘legends’ of American history, mythologizing the founding fathers and retelling key moments of the American Revolution so vividly that several of the legends…became part of American folklore.”2

Still, it’s interesting as a legend, an example of national myth-making and the religious reverence given to the cause of the American Revolution. Ronald Reagan even reportedly promoted the story in a commencement speech in California. Here is Hall’s account:

On July 4, 1776, in the old State House in Philadelphia, a group of patriotic men were gathered for the solemn purpose of proclaiming the liberty of the American colonies. From the letters of Thomas Jefferson which are preserved in the Library of Congress, I have been able to gather considerable data concerning this portentous session.

In reconstructing the scene, it is well to remember that if the Revolutionary War failed every man who had signed the parchment then lying on the table would be subject to the penalty of death for high treason. It should also be remembered that the delegates representing the various colonies were not entirely of one mind as to the policies which should dominate the new nation. Read More »

Thomas Paine

FROM “The American Revolution, Part II: Who Wrote the Declaration of Independence?” James Perloff:

I once heard a pastor preach a sermon on the Fourth of July. He quoted the beginning of the Declaration, laying emphasis on certain words in an effort to authenticate that America’s Founding Fathers were Christians:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . . .

As the phrases “Nature’s God” and “Creator” were quoted, congregation members were oohing and aahing in a sort of mental swoon. But I knew the writer was [Thomas] Paine, a self-proclaimed enemy of Christianity. Here are Paine quotes that demonstrate what he really meant by “Nature’s God” and “Creator”:

When, therefore, we look through nature up to nature’s God, we are in the right road of happiness, but when we trust to books as the Word of God, and confide in them as revealed religion, we are afloat on the ocean of uncertainty, and shatter into contending factions.¹²

But when I see throughout the greatest part of this book [the Bible] scarcely anything but a history of the grossest vices, and a collection of the most paltry and contemptible tales, I cannot dishonour my Creator by calling it by his name.¹³

As the pastor continued his “patriot” sermon, I heard such a litany of misrepresentations about America that rage built incrementally within me, until I finally walked out the door. I knew the pastor meant well, but Jesus Christ said he came to tell us the truth, and my tolerance for falsehood has a low breaking point.

Unfortunately, what this pastor was saying is very common in American evangelical churches, who subscribe to what might be called the “David Barton” view of the Founding Fathers. (Barton has made a career out of portraying them as Christians.)

“TWELVE monks, benighted on the road, observed that their guide was going astray. This, for fear of breaking their rule of silence, they forbore to notice, thinking within themselves that at daybreak he would see his mistake and put them in the right road. Accordingly, the guide discovering his error, with much confusion, was making many apologies; when the monks being now at liberty to speak, only said, with the greatest good humour: ‘Friend, we saw very well that you went out of your road; but we were then bound to silence.’ The man was struck with astonishment, and very much edified at this answer expressive of such patience and strictness of observance.”

— From the Life of St. Sisoes, Anchoret of Egypt

ALL OVER America, people have been shamed, ridiculed, defamed, shunned, bullied, fired, deliberately misrepresented and even arrested for resisting Covid tyranny and the real systemic racism. This man says he was fired from his job as a school teacher for politely pointing out the inconsistencies in the government’s virus rules. He has discovered something important: The truth is worth dying for.

Join him. Speak up. You have everything to lose. Except your soul.

I know I had to go… my river overflowed
I had to lose them blues comin’ from the cold side of the moon
I had to see the deep dark sea come crashing over me

But nothing’s taking me down
Nothing’s taking me down
Something Good is Always around
Something Good is coming around

I’m gonna find that Gold that keeps a man from growing old
I’m gonna give it away just as long as I got days

So I’ll try not to cry when it comes my time to die
Soon I’ll be on the moon and the rock will roll away from the tomb
Today I get to stay… I’m so happy I can say:

That nothing’s taking me down
Nothing’s taking me down
Something Good is Always around
Something Good is coming around

Landscape with a Peasant Cottage, Jan Van Goyen; 1631

SEEK not to be like evil men, neither desire to be with them: Because their mind studieth robberies, and their lips speak deceits. By wisdom the house shall be built, and by prudence it shall be strengthened. By instruction the storerooms shall be filled with all precious and most beautiful wealth. A wise man is strong: and a knowing man, stout and valiant.

— Proverbs 24, 1-5

SOME GOOD news for July Fourth week:

A southern Illinois judge ruled yesterday that Governor J.B. Pritzker exceeded his executive powers and violated the state constitution in repeatedly extending his initial 30-day Covid shutdown orders. In response to a lawsuit filed by state Representative Darren Bailey, Clay County Circuit Judge Michael McHaney rendered void the ongoing “mandatory” restrictions, including the wearing of masks, social distancing and limitations on crowd size or restaurant capacity. Illinois restaurants could not exceed 25 percent capacity under the latest restrictions.

What is true in Illinois applies to many other states: governors had no authority at all to shutdown or limit business and social activity for months.

What I want to know is, isn’t Pritzker’s violation of the state constitution a crime?

I guess not, if the people robbed actually support the crime. Read More »

THE Covid operation is a form of systematic mass torture, Amazing Polly argues — and I entirely agree.

We are not locked up in a prison or concentration camp, but we have been manipulated, confined and made to suffer physically, mentally and economically by our torturers. Our humanity is under attack in an effort to bring about blind submission. The New Normal is the New Subnormal.

CATHOLICS scrub graffiti from the statue of St. Louis, in St. Louis, Missouri.