THE Eric Whitacre Singers perform on Eric Whitacre’s album “Water Night.” Video made by Mike Ring.

AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, has the power to make or break the careers of American politicians. Everyone in politics knows that. AIPAC’s friends bribe politicians. (It’s not “lobbying,” it’s bribery. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s in the open.) So why the storm over comments by Democrat Ilhan Omar? The pit bulls will not tolerate this knowledge becoming more widely known among the general public. If harmless small fry like Omar are allowed to state damaging facts many people already know, then the real truth-tellers might stand a chance.

AIPAC, and the other three dozen or so Israeli lobbying groups in Washington, should be registered as the agents of a foreign country, and politicians who work for Israel should move there. (The Israel lobby, which many Jews do not entirely support, also includes Christian Zionist groups.)

In related news, learn how hired Israeli manipulators (“hasbara”) influence debate on the Internet here.

What is an “anti-Semite?”

An “anti-Semite” is someone who has the nerve to cry out as he’s being attacked by Jewish control freaks. His cries of pain are “anti-Semitic tropes.”

Sometimes it seems that the problem with “anti-Semites” is not what they say, but that they dare to exist. That’s the problem with the Palestinians. They dare to exist.

Remember, your tax dollars fund genocidal violence:

See full-length movie here.

By the way, the just solution is not, as Noam Chomsky argues, a two-state solution, but one state.
Read More »

Impurity imprisons a man in material things. Normally, his taste for study fades and his intelligence diminishes because his strength to concentrate on more elevated matters perishes. He loses the pleasure for abstract thought, which forms the basis for the life of the mind. The imagination runs out of control, fantasy begins to dominate his mind. The will becomes soft; the certainty of reason disappears, and it becomes insecure. The man’s spiritual nature wanes as matter increasingly communicates to the soul its animal influence. Then, the spirit deteriorates and fades. 

One proof of this is that all the peoples who deliver themselves to immorality decay from the intellectual point of view. 

— Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira

IF A perfume company released a report lamenting the fact that few men use perfume, and stated that “traditional masculinity” is to blame, would you be surprised? How about if the company said perfume will make men happier and the world a better place?

Wouldn’t the possibility of self-interest on the part of the company occur to you?

Why then when the leading organization that markets and regulates talk-based psychotherapy announced that “traditional masculinity,” with its stoicism and emotional reserve, is bad and that men need to be more emotional and willing to submit to psychotherapy, were so many conservative commentators alarmed and seemingly stunned?

A storm of protest continues over the American Psychological Association’s recent guidelines on psychological treatment for men and boys.

“Traits of so-called ‘traditional masculinity,’ like suppressing emotions & masking distress, often start early in life & have been linked to less willingness by boys & men to seek help, more risk-taking & aggression — possibly harming themselves & those with whom they interact,” the APA stated as part of its highly successful promotional campaign.

Men don’t seek or like psychotherapy as much as women. That’s been true since Sigmund Freud. Can you imagine any of the men Americans have, for better or worse, most admired in therapy? Can you imagine George Washington on the couch? Yes, masculinity itself is to blame. Therefore, if you want more people to go into therapy, you would want there to be less masculinity in the world. If you sell french fries, you want more people to eat french fries.

Who cares what the American Psychological Association, with its hundreds of millions of dollars and its blind endorsement of all kinds of social ills, thinks about masculinity?

Seriously, who cares? What else would you expect? The enemy will always try to disarm men.

The APA can’t even convincingly answer the most basic questions of human existence, such as why suffering exists and whether life has any meaning at all if one is not happy. It can’t tell you why you are here. It cannot give a single human being a truly good answer for why he should accept and endure. That would be okay if it were selling perfume or french fries. But it purports to sell actual cures for unhappiness and emotional suffering. That’s a tall order for a profession that cannot explain why these exist in the first place and that endorses the whole panoply of disorders that has caused grave personal unhappiness, including crushing materialism, broken marriages, homosexuality, abortion, contraception and mixed-up sex roles. Since the modern science of psychology was born, things have gotten worse, not better. That’s because it’s not science alone, it’s a philosophy of life, and this philosophy, which cannot answer even a child’s philosophical questions, is deeply nihilistic. It does not offer the two greatest cures for unhappiness — prayer and penance — because it cannot even begin to grasp these supernatural things or the love that is the infrastructure of reality. It is nihilistic. It does not understand the source of our problems, whether it be depression or addiction or sadness in marriage. Sin — our own sins and the sins of others — makes us deeply unhappy. If there is one word you will never find in the lexicon of psychology it is “sin.” And yet it explains so much.

We have a purpose regardless of our pain. It cannot be found in modern psychology. Who cares what these masters of the universe think? They are running a business.

Someday this business will be reduced to dust. Our souls, on the other hand, will live forever. And in the moments after our deaths, our whole lives will pass before us in the presence of God. And whether we were unhappy or not won’t matter in the least, only what we did to respond to that love. How much we loved in return will matter a great deal.

MARIAN T. Horvat, Ph.D. argues that expressions of love have been trivialized:

The list of what the modern man purports to love is endless: “I love that restaurant, I love to barbecue, I love my dog, my cat, my hamster, my Subaru…”

The word loses its meaning and becomes as banal as the objects one claims to love. “To love” is trivialized, flattened and loses its original noble meaning. Read More »

Come, Holy Ghost

Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest, And in our hearts take up Thy rest;
Come with thy grace and heav’nly aid to fill the hearts which thou hast made,
To fill the hearts which Thou has made.

O Comforter, to thee we cry, Thou heav’nly gift from God most high;
Thou fount of life, and fire of love, And sweet anointing from above,
And sweet anointing from above.

CARYL writes:

Your recent post on Lawrence Auster and Fatherhood was great. I am sure that he knew —and that you know of Daniel Amneus and his books – Back to Patriarchy, The Garbage Generation, which is found at this site.

Amneus’s books are about the importance of fatherhood.  In Back to Patriarchy,   he described the American male  as “surely the most exploited, even if not the most degraded and impoverished human who ever lived.” Read More »

The Drunkenness of Noah, Giovanni Bellini; 1515

IN THE forthcoming book Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism, to be published soon by VDare Books, the late Lawrence Auster argues that the cultural revolution of the past 60 years has been, at its roots, a revolt against fatherhood — the fatherhood of human fathers, of all institutions and traditions of authority, and, most importantly, of God Himself.

In this great insight, Auster explains why in our own time, men are infantilized in popular culture, why they are depicted in commercials, TV shows and movies as juvenile and useless. This denigration, and even demonizing, of grown men is a latter day manifestation of the sixties revolt against parents and patriarchy. His observation also explains why many men are immature. For without reverence for fatherhood in all its forms, they simply cannot reach maturity.

Here is the passage:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we’ve discussed is, in one form or another, a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe—this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture.

For the revolutionary generation of the 1960s, the psychological source of this rebellion was typically a rejection of their actual parents, because of some perceived inadequacy or betrayal. Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the feminist writer and cofounder of Ms. magazine, writes of a shameful secret her parents had kept from her until she was twelve. Read More »

ELLEN BROWN says the real problem in Venezuela is American efforts to prevent it from achieving economic sovereignty:

Venezuela and other countries that are carrying massive debts in currencies that are not their own are not sovereign. Governments that are sovereign can and have engaged in issuing their own currencies for infrastructure and development quite successfully. I have discussed a number of contemporary and historical examples in my earlier articles, including in Japan, China, Australia and Canada.

Although Venezuela is not technically at war, it is suffering from foreign currency strains triggered by aggressive attacks by a foreign power. U.S. economic sanctions have been going on for years, causing the country at least $20 billion in losses. About $7 billion of its assets are now being held hostage by the U.S., which has waged an undeclared war against Venezuelaever since George W. Bush’s failed military coup against President Hugo Chávez in 2002. Chávez boldly announced the “Bolivarian Revolution,” a series of economic and social reforms that dramatically reduced poverty and illiteracy as well as improved health and living conditions for millions of Venezuelans. The reforms, which included nationalizing key components of the nation’s economy, made Chávez a hero to millions of people and the enemy of Venezuela’s oligarchs. Read More »

THIS ARTICLE from an 1869 issue of Lippincott’s Magazine is definitely dated, but it still contains some important observations on the advantages of poverty:

The longer I contemplate Poverty, the more charms does she unveil to my entranced gaze. But is it quite right to flaunt our advantages in people’s faces, and harrow up their feelings merely because they unfortunately possess money? Doubtless it is not their fault. It was their grandfather, or a lucky thing in soldiers’ overcoats. “Where ignorance,” etc. No, let us keep ourselves to ourselves, we of the Brotherhood of Lean Purses, and only when we meet to munch together the festive crust, and drain the flowing bowl of cold water, sing this, the song of proud and independent poverty:

“My mind to me a kingdom is;

Such perfect joy therein I find
As far exceeds all earthly bliss Read More »

JAMES H. writes:

About 35 years ago I attended a party with several friends and acquaintances. An acquaintance, Alan, a graduate of the finest local schools and the Ivy Leagues was holding court and pontificating on our country’s predicament. Alan was a melancholy sort not given to enthusiasms of any kind. He possessed a morose serious air that lent credence to his various pronouncements. He acknowledged our sorry state of affairs and the troublesome trajectory our nation was on but declared that the nature of progress was such that we could expect to establish a new more stable order guaranteeing happiness for far greater numbers.  I argued that our nation’s travails could only be solved by embracing tradition, order and transcendent authority without which the centrifugal forces tearing us apart would continue to work inexorably to our detriment.

He then pulled his trump card, insisting that even were it so, “we can never go back,” that the fruits of “progress” once tasted can never be forgotten or forgone. Read More »

Francis and Sheikh Ahmad al-Tayeb

ONCE AGAIN, “Pope” Francis, the fake pontiff in Rome, has been traveling far to promote his vision of the New World Order. This week he visited Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirate where Francis and Sheikh Ahmad al-Tayeb, the grand imam of an influential Egyptian mosque, Al Azhar, signed a “Document on Human Fraternity.” The document called on “all concerned to stop using religions to incite hatred, violence, extremism and blind fanaticism, and to refrain from using the name of God to justify acts of murder, exile, terrorism and oppression.”

It also stated that the multiplicity of religions was willed by God. Please see the commentary at Novus Ordo Watch (here and here) as to why this is so illogical, outrageous and blasphemous, making God the author of confusion.

The purpose of this post, however, is to point out that the signed document is a direct contradiction, not of the thinking (if we dare to call it that) of the man we call the Argentine Bomber — they are fully consistent with Francis’s One World Religion globalism — but with the thinking of al-Tayeb, who has repeatedly indicated that there can only be one true faith and that serious apostates who threaten a Muslim society should be put to death. Here in this 2016 interview he explains his views on the subject of religious liberty.

Please note that al-Tayeb talks about harsh punishment for apostates, i.e., those who have left the faith, not for “infidels,” i.e., those who have never held the faith. This is very different from the goofy relativism of the Argentine Bomber, eh?

The imam’s punishment for apostasy is certainly to be rejected. But he is right in his understanding that defection from God’s plan for society is a serious matter. Those who threaten the social reign of the true religion (which cannot be Islam) should not be killed, but, to borrow a misused Bergoglio-ism, marginalized. He is right that the moral and religious relativism of the West, which the fake pope does indeed support, is deeply dangerous to social order. The sheik is to be commended for his understanding, which we can assume he has not given up despite this new grandstanding document on “brotherhood,” that religion is not simply a personal matter. God has rights too. His social rights are much more substantial than the occasional lip service American presidents, going as far back as George Washington, have paid to their Masonic ruler.

The brotherhood espoused by the fake pope and the imam will surely never be practiced in any devout Muslim society such as the imam envisions. It is already fully in place in the world Francis represents, and thus he is once again just a mascot for surrender. This anti-papal globetrotter has no shame at all. He constantly supports one of the most repulsive buzzwords in the English language — “fraternity,” the hypocritical Masonic code word for the revolutionary overthrow of social order. And that’s because he doesn’t believe in the faith he professes to represent, indeed he is essentially an atheist, and thus cannot possibly be a true pope. Frank is a fake — the worst and most dangerous fake in our world of fakery. “Fraternity” is just a weapon for turning militance into mush.

[The Sheikh, by the way, is also to be commended for his denunciation during Francis’s visit of the Western news media’s characterization of Islam after 9/11 as a “bloodthirsty religion” and of Muslims as “savage barbarians.” He was right in this case because the massive evidence does not support Muslim involvement in the attack on the World Trade Center. And the “pope’s” condemnation of world violence included only mild condemnation of the terrible war in Yemen waged by his hosts, and did not mention specifics as to who are the most threatening perpetrators of religious violence today. Who are those who believe that they have the religious right to destroy anyone who opposes them?]

FROM a letter to the editor in the February issue of Culture Wars magazine, available soon here:

Like the narrative put forward by the oligarchs of the West that homosexuals are not culpable for their actions because “they were born this way,” so too the alt-right believes it itself is not morally culpable. Ultimately it’s fine with how those who bring about the “white ethnostate” behave, because the end result is being surrounded by “white people,” and therefore surrounded by “white thinking,” and the culture will then become “high trust” and advanced. This narrative is multi-layered egoism. It proclaims genetic superiority, zero personal moral culpability (unless it hinders the means to the ethnostate end), and runs purely on reactionary hatred in response to the culture war against “white guys.” Truth is, these people don’t want an “ethnostate.” They don’t even understand what ethnos is. What they want is a “biostate.” A state where the “white genes” are protected and cultivated for a mechanical and egoist position. If these genes are cultivated, then the believed end result is a “high trust” and worthwhile society. Adhering to morality, especially if it is perceived to go against the interests of establishing this biostate, is the product of weakness or backwards caveman religiosity, unable to see a greater “abstract morality.” Read More »

SUSAN-ANNE WHITE writes from Northern Ireland:

I have contacted you in the recent past about Megan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, because I believe she is promoting a feminist and sexual revolutionary agenda. Of course her husband Prince Harry is just like her as are most members of the Royal Family. However she is an aggressive agitator and never misses an opportunity to cheapen and coarsen an already depraved society. The video below reveals what she got up to last week. The title accompanying the video says it all.

The words “sex workers” is a euphemism. They are prostitutes. The Bible calls such women whores and their wicked clients “whoremongers.” Prostitution should be illegal everywhere and those engaged in it and their “clients” should be prosecuted and identified.

Mrs Wood, I hope you and your readers share my concerns about this disturbing woman.

Scholar Sharpening his Quill

WE LIVE in an era of faith. Too much faith. Far too many people live on faith exclusively.

Faith is the acceptance of a belief on the authority of someone else. For instance, I have never been to Athens, Greece, but I take it on the authority of many others that it exists.

Faith should never work against reason. The problem arises when faith overcomes all reason.

Here’s one example. Many learn the idea from others that God doesn’t exist, even though the existence of God can without much difficulty be proven with the use of reason. But instead of reasoning it out, they take it entirely on faith that God doesn’t exist. And off they go.

College professors tell students that humans — who think and speak — evolved from organisms that cannot think or speak. And, on faith alone, without troubling to reason it out, people swallow this patently ridiculous idea that has never been verified scientifically. It has spread in the same way a false rumor spreads. It excites people and they believe it. Most people in history would have shaken their heads in wonder if they could have foreseen that a belief like this would someday have universal acclaim. It would have instantly disproven to them that intellectual progress is inevitable.

People are told that the differences between the sexes are unnatural and can be almost totally eliminated. On the authority of others, despite all the evidence of their senses and simple reason, they believe it! Why do they believe such an absurdity? It has certain advantages, it’s true. But generally it is easier to accept everything on blind faith. And many have placed their faith in the powerful and the foolish.

Here’s another whopper: we are told it is “hateful” to protect one’s own country from foreign invasion. And many believe it! The most hideous or uninteresting of “artworks” are displayed in museums and are called fine art. Many believe because they are told to believe. Or there’s the biggest whopper of all: six million people were gassed to death. Six million. Not to mention that skyscrapers can collapse in clouds of dust not long after catching fire — when nothing even remotely similar has ever been seen.

Accepting things on faith is not necessarily bad. We can’t think everything out in life. But it is bad when those with normal mental equipment are asked to violate common sense on the most essential questions — and they do it happily.

One more absurdity people take on faith: “We can’t go back.” We are told that we must accept a world of big stores, big buildings, big roads, big noise, big wars, big companies, big government, big taxes, and we can never, ever go back to the humane, scaled-down smallness we all secretly want. We are told we can’t go back and so we believe it obediently. The Age of Reason was misnamed. We live in its twilight: The Age of Blind Faith.

THE VAST majority of people in our world has retained some kind of conviction, however shadowy, in the immortality of the soul. “Well, wherever he is now, I’m sure he’s happy,” people might say at a funeral (or a “celebration of life”). This conviction is the legacy of centuries of a Christian (i.e., Catholic) social order that no longer exists. Very few Westerners believe in reincarnation or total oblivion.

However, most also believe that it is only just and fair that someone who is basically decent should be happy in the afterlife. By basically decent, I mean someone who fulfills many duties to family and friends, never breaks the law, has defects but is good-hearted and likeable. It greatly offends modern sensibilities to suggest that this kind of niceness and decency is not necessarily rewarded by God with eternal happiness or that the person could even be punished.

The problem with the presumption that everyone nice goes to heaven is, it’s not what God has revealed about eternity. It substitutes human judgment for divine reason.

It also doesn’t make sense.

Heaven is not earth. It is a supernatural state. In order to pass from the natural into the supernatural sphere, we must acquire supernatural virtues, which are more akin to goodness directed toward God than to humans. In order to qualify for the Olympic Games, to use one analogy, one must meet certain athletic qualifications. The belief that someone can get to Heaven because they have been generally decent and good is similar to the belief that someone who is a great software engineer should be able to compete in the decathlon.

To take another analogy, in order to live on Mars, we need oxygen. In order to live in heaven, we need spiritual oxygen, which is a supernatural gift — a gift from God we can refuse or accept — and involves not just works but faith. Read More »

MICHAEL S. writes:

I sometimes pass this ad on my way to work. I think of you, of course — although there is no similarity.

This is Sixth Avenue and 47th Street in Manhattan— the so-called “Diamond District” — you know, home, in a sense, of the engagement ring scam. Interesting that the word “marriage” does not come to mind when viewing this ad. Because as far as she is concerned, it is not even a question.

Laura writes:

From the kitchen into Hell’s Kitchen — the Hell’s Kitchen of perpetual indebtedness.

Feminism has made women easy prey to lending schemes.

See Zippy’s Usury FAQ to learn why the student loan (and all the related predatory financing as advertised in this billboard) is wrong — for the lender, not the borrower — and is similar to the indentured servitude of the past. In fact, it’s worse because of the interest rates. The birthrate among Millennials is lower than even expected and one of the reasons (though not the main reason) is the student loan. It’s institutionalized infertility.

St. Francis de Sales

POPULATION CONTROL experts say there are too many people in the world. They say there is not enough food, shelter, jobs, clean air, open space, etc. for so many billions and that if we don’t do something to prevent more births, terrible things will happen. The evidence of demographic winter, not plenty, does not divert these alarming prophecies. These experts want the planet far less crowded.

Are there too many people? Is the world too crowded? It’s a fair question. Possibly you have wondered yourself.

But when it comes to world population, there is only one issue — one burning issue — that is decisive, and it has nothing to do with food or environmental issues. We only need to answer this question: Are there too many people for God to love? If there are too many people for God to love, if He does not create each and every person in His image, then the population controllers would be absolutely right in suggesting limits.

Perhaps you have been walking down a crowded street or been in a busy airport or packed stadium, and honestly wondered about this too. Looking at all the many people coming and going, perhaps you have grown fatigued of human beings. “Enough, already!”  Perhaps you have thought that it is simply impossible for God not to feel the same fatigue and for Him to love every single person individually. It is certainly impossible for us. 

Unfortunately, by studying statistics or our own abilities, we cannot arrive at an answer. We need a scientist of God’s love to give us the answer.

St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622) was just that kind of scientist. The French bishop, who came from an aristocratic family with a father who was not enthused about his becoming a priest, possessed such learning  that he was eventually declared a Doctor of the Universal Church. But he also possessed a beautiful simplicity, which helped him to study the evidence of God’s love that is not in books.

In his Treatise on the Love of God, St. Francis de Sales wrote:

The Heart of God is so abundant in love and its goodness is so infinite that all can possess it, without anyone’s share diminishing. Infinite Goodness cannot be exhausted, even if it fills all the souls in the world. God does not pour a smaller quantity of His love into a soul because He pours out His love into an infinity of others; the power of His love is not diminished by the multitude of rays that He spreads abroad, but remain ever overflowing with its immensity.

God knocks on the door of every heart. Open the door and you will begin to see the limitlessness of His love. Keep it open and you will cease to wonder whether there could ever be enough for billions. The saint continues:

Ah, my God! How frequently we should put the query to our soul: Is it possible that I have been loved, and so tenderly loved by my Saviour, that He was pleased to think of me in particular, and ion all those little occurrences by which He has drawn me to Him? How much should we appreciate them, and how carefully turn them to our profit!

(Treatise on the Love of God, Book 4; Ch. 14; O. V, p. 215) 

Population control experts suffer from a serious limitation. Their hearts are not as large as the heart of God. They are like a farmer who plants seeds and has no consciousness that the sun is responsible for their growth into mature plants. The population controllers live and thrive in the light of Divine Love — they wouldn’t exist without it — and yet they don’t know it, or refuse to know it.

To say there are too many people in the world is to say there is too much God. And that is impossible.

This great God, Who is uniquely good, is correct in desiring our whole heart. Ours is only a little heart, and it cannot sufficiently return the love due to the Divine Goodness…However, God does not love us out of self-interest but for our good. Our love is useless to Him, but it brings us great profit! If it pleases Him, it is because it is profitable to us. (T.L.G. Book 10, Ch. 13; O. V. p. 209)

God loves us for our own good, not for His good. It is arduous work, the whole goal of the spiritual life, to respond to the abundance of this divine light. Here is a very good compilation of the words of the great saint, whose feast day is today, to help along the way. A free reading of this book is available here.

Saints, not statisticians and demographers, can tell us whether there are too many people or not. Read More »