TONY S. writes:

Just about everyone in my circle is what would be termed a “conservative”, i.e. supportive of the Republican party and Trump, very supportive of America, “freedom”, and the capitalist/consumerist system. I put quotation marks around the word “freedom” because the American conservative uses the word in its post-Enlightenment connotation, basically being free to do what one wants, as opposed to its traditional or classical meaning of being free of one’s own passions.

This week, I was approached by three friends about the pummeling of a female Olympic boxer by someone suspected of being a trans/male (I’m not really sure of the proper term). Read More »

IN 1854, a slave in Washington, D.C., along with her two daughters, was provided with references so that she could seek new masters. The three were being offered for sale for $1,800 — the equivalent of about $67,000 in today’s currency.

Here are their references:

The bearer, Mary Jane, and her two daughters, are for sale. They are sold for no earthly fault whatever. She is one of the most ladylike and trustworthy servants I ever knew. She is a first rate parlour servant; can arrange and set out a dinner or party supper with as much taste as the most of white ladies. She is a pretty good mantua maker; can cut out and make vests and pantaloons and roundabouts and joseys for little boys in a first rate manner. Her daughters’ ages are eleven and thirteen years, brought up exclusively as house servants. The eldest can sew neatly, both can knit stockings; and all are accustomed to all kinds of house work. They would not be sold to speculators or traders for any price whatever. Read More »

ALAN writes:

We met when you were still in your glory days in the 1950s and when I was a wee lad.  Among my earliest memories of you are the colorful parades and bands who marched along Washington Avenue through the garment district, where thousands of people worked in companies that made clothing, hats, and shoes; when my father took me downtown and we walked along the cobblestones on the riverfront; and when my mother and I stepped aboard the majestic S.S Admiral for a river cruise from downtown to Jefferson Barracks.

As I grew up, you continued to flourish in the early 1960s when groups of businessmen expressed confidence and optimism in the pages of their Downtown Newsletter.

Goodbye to the Ambassador Theater and Lowe’s State Theater, Miss Hulling’s Cafeterias, the Forum Cafeteria, and the Pope’s Cafeterias.  And to the old Sheraton-Jefferson Hotel, with its attractive lobby, bank of pay telephones, Gas House Room, and elegant Gold Room, where actress Lucille Ball spoke one winter evening in 1965.

Goodbye to the big Woolworth and Kresge dime stores, Hunleth Music on Broadway, the Mark Twain Hotel, the Old Spaghetti Factory, and the magnificent Union Station, where we greeted loved ones when they arrived on passenger trains in the 1950s.

Goodbye to the masculine police officers –never women– who directed traffic at busy intersections, and to the streetcars and many bus routes that crisscrossed downtown.

Goodbye to the magazine departments in drug stores and department stores, to Gladys at the Baldwin Piano Company, and to my good friend Mr. T. and the Catholic book store on Olive Street where he worked.

When she worked as a secretary before getting married, one of my cousins lived downtown in the Evangeline Residence, and she had fond memories of the Orient Restaurant on North Seventh Street. Read More »

Video link

“IF YOU choose to lump all flowers together, lilies, and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call them daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word daisy … It is barbaric and reactionary to destroy cultural distinctions between one thing and another, because it is like rubbing out all the lines of a fine drawing.”

— G.K. Chesterton, What’s Wrong with the World

I have not touched the big stories during the last few days about the opening ceremonies of the Paris Olympics. I have no desire to do that. This entry is just a brief acknowledgement that I am aware of how bad it was. I know this was not the worst of it.

I agree with Peggy Hall, who writes:

Let me spell it out: you do not need to sit and analyze the opening ceremony of the Olympics to know it’s unimportant, likely demonic, intended to hypnotize you, control your mind, and shape your perspective.

Even those well-meaning folks who analyze and break it down—are you with me here?—you’re exposing yourself to it anyway! That’s exactly what the bad guys want. They want you to be exposed to it, even if you’re looking at it to analyze and say, “Oh, this is disgusting.” Why would you look at something disgusting? I don’t, and I hope you don’t either.

“But Peggy, I need to know what’s going on.”

You already know what’s going on! These ceremonies, Super Bowl shows, and other similar events have been mocking people of faith for years, only to backpedal and say, “Oh, we’re so sorry if you were offended. We didn’t mean to offend anyone. We’re being inclusive.” I don’t need to share any images for you to understand the underhanded game they’re playing.

I have nothing to add. It’s all been said. It’s all too repulsive. Read More »

THREE tactics are essential to successful lying on a large scale — something I don’t personally recommend.

The first strategy is to lie big — really big. Most people (in the Western world), if they lie at all, fall into small lies. They can’t grasp the mentality of those who invent spectacular lies. They just can’t accept that such brash manipulation exists. There’s a sort of hubris beneath this non-acceptance, an escapist rejection of the reality of evil. The gullible want reality and the fallen state of man to conform to their expectations. Truthfully, who can blame them? It’s hard to reckon with being conned.

Knowing all this and likely being a keen observer of human nature, the liar wields big lies with abandon. Read More »

“WHAT struck former President Trump in the ear was a bullet, whether whole or fragmented into smaller pieces, fired from the deceased subject’s rifle.”

— FBI statement on July 26, 2024

You can find images of real bullet wounds online if you would like to compare. At this point, the doubling down on this story is a humiliation ritual.

“THE huge maritime slave traffic had great consequences for all the countries concerned. In Liverpool it made millionaires, and elsewhere in England, Europe and New England it brought prosperity not only to ship owners but to the distillers of rum and manufacturers of other trade goods. In the American plantation districts it immensely stimulated the production of the staple crops. On the other hand it kept the planters constantly in debt for their dearly bought labor, and it left a permanent and increasingly complex problem of racial adjustments. In Africa it largely transformed the primitive scheme of life, and for the worse. It created new and often unwholesome wants; it destroyed old industries and it corrupted tribal institutions. The rum, the guns, the utensils and the gewgaws were irresistible temptations. Every chief and every tribesman acquired a potential interest in slave getting and slave selling. Charges of witchcraft, adultery, theft and other crimes were trumped up that the number of convicts for sale might be swelled; debtors were pressed that they might be adjudged insolvent and their persons delivered to the creditors; the sufferings of famine were left unrelieved that parents might be forced to sell their children or themselves; kidnapping increased until no man or woman and especially no child was safe outside a village; and wars and raids were multiplied until towns by hundreds were swept from the earth and great zones lay void of their former teeming population.

“The slave trade has well been called the systematic plunder of a continent. But in the irony of fate those Africans who lent their hands to the looting got nothing but deceptive rewards, while the victims of the rapine were quite possibly better off on the American plantations than the captors who remained in the African jungle. The only participants who got unquestionable profit were the English, European and Yankee traders and manufacturers.”

—- U.B. Phillips, American Negro slavery: a survey of the supply, employment and control of Negro labor as determined by the plantation régime; 1918

“BEATEN, r*ped, strangled and left to die in the frozen playground of her school in Sweden.

“Ten-year-old Luna survived but will always suffer the consequences of the severe injuries she received at the hands of a serial sexual offender immigrant.

“More than a year since the assault and she still cannot speak and has difficulty moving.

“She could be your sister or your daughter. Is this the future we want for our children?”

— Klaus Arminius

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Capt. Paul Cuffe; Chester Harding

MOST AMERICANS have never heard of the 18th-century figure Paul Cuffe (1759-1817), who was the son of a slave from West Africa. Despite the neglect of his legacy, Cuffe was an important visionary.

“Cuffe was born free on Cuttyhunk Island, Massachusetts (near New Bedford) sometime around 1759. The exact date of his birth is unknown. He was the youngest of ten children. His father, Kofi (also known as Cuffe Slocum), was from the Ashanti Empire in West Africa. Kofi was captured, enslaved and brought to New England at the age of 10. Paul’s mother, Ruth Moses, was Native American. Kofi, a skilled tradesman who was able to earn his freedom, died when Paul Cuffe was a teenager. The younger Cuffe refused to use the name Slocum, which his father had been given by his owner, and instead took his father’s first name.” (Source)

Cuffe became an abolitionist and advocated for voting rights for blacks in Massachusetts. These efforts ultimately disappointed him and this disappointment changed his thinking.

A successful businessman, he had surveyed the prospects open to blacks in the developing country and the chances of fitting in with the new nation. He wanted instead to gather his fellow Africans and take them home.

“Cuffe, first a whaling ship captain, eventually became a ship owner, operating a number of vessels which sailed between ports along the coast of Massachusetts.  By 1811 he was reputedly the wealthiest African American in the United States and the largest employer of free African Americans.  Despite his commercial success, Cuffe became increasingly disillusioned with the racial status of African Americans, and believed the creation of an independent African nation led by returnees from the United States offered the best prospects for free blacks and for African modernization.” (Source)

The idea that African-Americans instinctively seek a homeland that cannot be found on the North American continent is verboten in the American mainstream. Cuffe represented and promoted that idea.

Many prominent Americans over the years shared his conviction. They included Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Francis Scott Key, John Randolph, Henry Clay and, most of all, Abraham Lincoln, who was adamant up until his death that the only chance of happiness and success for blacks lay in their return to Africa.

In 1811, Cuffe, in a ship staffed by a black crew, sailed to Sierra Leone and made arrangements for settlements of blacks from America. In 1815, he returned to Africa with a shipload of former slaves. His death two years later ended his project but his dream was embodied in the formation that very year of the American Colonization Society, which would ultimately have success in helping more than 10,000 former slaves return to Africa.

Other blacks would take up the dream that had captured Cuffe’s imagination, most prominently Marcus Garvey, a hero to millions of descendants of slaves.

Every people has a “soul,” an indescribable cohesion of purpose and direction given them by their loving Creator. Those rooted to excess in the material are not able to recognize this soul anymore than they can recognize other transcendent dimensions of existence. Those who never see the struggles of a people to have a home have left dreamers like Cuffe and Garvey in strange neglect on the pages of history.

Read More »

(Language warning)

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“IT IS the essence of piety to honor your father and mother because they are yours and because they have given you a gift you can never recompense. This piety extends to the land of your birth, the “rocks and rills,” the “templed hills,” as the old patriotic anthem has it. The character of a nation is not to be found primarily in great political movements, and certainly not in an obsession with ‘progress.’ It is found in its land and weather, the kind of people who work there, the music they sing, the places where they worship, the games they play, the food they raise; what they honor and love, and what they will shed their blood to save.”

— Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes

ALAN writes:

One day I walked into a supermarket, intending to purchase only a few items. I looked around for one of those little baskets available for that purpose — baskets that had been there for years. How stupid of me. No more baskets are there. Why is that? We abandoned them because customers were stealing them.

On another day I walked into a different supermarket, intending to purchase only a few items, including a bar of soap. How stupid of me. No more soap in the soap aisle. Instead: Empty shelves with sign, Ask for soap at cash register.

So I stood there for a moment of incredulity, among dozens of people engaged in busyness but blissfully unaware of the idiocy of such decisions or willfully blind to it. And I recalled the simple pleasure of shopping for groceries in corner markets in the 1950s-’60s, moments that now loom as marks of high civilization.

Baskets abandoned and soap and detergent taken off shelves and hidden away because of theft by The Diversity. Idiocy. Two more proofs of a population of Whites gone imbecile.  And two more arguments in favor of complete separation of the races. Read More »

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: Read 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