ALL news stories, especially those broadcast instantly around the globe, should be approached with critical thinking skills. Think before you swallow.

This story about an American man, Stephen Weber, drowning while proposing to his girlfriend at a luxury resort in Zanzibar suggests scripting and orchestration. The story supposedly originated from a Facebook post by his girlfriend Kenesha Antoine, the allegedly bereaved bride-to-be. Agence France Presse reports:

An American man has drowned while proposing to his girlfriend underwater at an idyllic island off the coast of Tanzania, a luxury resort said in a statement Sunday.

His girlfriend Kenesha Antoine posted on her Facebook page footage of Steven Weber proposing to her through the window of their underwater hotel room at the luxury Manta Resort in Zanzibar.

“You never emerged from those depths so you never got to hear my answer, ‘Yes! Yes! A million times, yes, I will marry you!!’,” she wrote Friday in a post confirming his death.

It’s odd that this accidental death so quickly became international news and that so much is known about the deceased so soon after his death.  So much is known, that is, except any details about why or how he died. Read More »

St. Martin giving his coat to a beggar, French miniature, 1290

GOD has made the rich depend on the poor, and the poor on the rich. The rich should take care of the poor, in order that the poor may take care of the rich. The misery of the poor is corporal. The misery of the rich is generally spiritual. The rich, therefore, should give corporal relief to the poor, in order to receive from them spiritual aid in turn. Without the assistance of the rich, the poor would die corporally. Without the prayers and blessings of the poor, the rich would die spiritually. Graces and chastisements are in the hands of the poor. When they implore mercy for him who aids them, God grants their prayers. When they demand justice against those who send them away empty, God also grants their prayers. “Son, defraud not the poor of alms, and turn not away thy eyes from the poor. For the prayer of him that curseth thee in the bitterness of his soul shall be heard: for He that made him will hear him.” (Ecclus. iv., 1, 6.)

A rich man is in danger of losing his soul when he has not the prayers and blessings of the poor. In this world, the rich are the judges of the poor. In the world to come, the poor will be the judges of the rich. Those who have not the poor for their advocates, will not find grace with their judge. He who has the poor to plead for him, need not fear, but may rejoice.

— “The Corporal Works of Mercy,” Fr. Michael Mueller, 1881

ALAN writes:

I know exactly how Paul A. feels.  [“Hardships of the Single Life, cont.”, Sept. 2 ] He is only 50. I am 20 years older and intimately acquainted with the kind of life he describes.

“Everything is far away,” he wrote. And that is true. But I remember a time when it wasn’t true.  Cities once consisted of self-sufficient neighborhoods where everything was not far away.  Older men and women in St. Louis have written about how, during their childhood years, everything their family needed could be found within walking distance.  That was true for us in the 1950s.

Then came a variety of factors to explode that arrangement:  Motor vehicles, highways, the development of mass marketing, the invention of the teenager and then the youth subculture, the destruction of neighborhoods, and the surrender of local power and law to distant places, among others.  Alan Ehrenhalt discussed many of these factors in his 1995 book The Lost City: Discovering the Forgotten Virtues of Community in the Chicago of the 1950s, which I recommend.

I once knew an older man who lived alone for 50 years. He and his wife had separated and neither ever remarried.  In some ways, he told me, it was a terrible way to live, and it could be terribly lonely.  He was right.  I learned it, too, from long experience. Read More »

Illustration of the original 1835 Saugerties Lighthouse (lower right) from William Wade’s 1846 engraving Panorama of the Hudson River

LIGHTHOUSES are romantic vestiges of a less sophisticated time. Many historic American lighthouses have been destroyed, which is a shame, because the lonely vigilance of their resident lighthouse keepers and the stories of the lives they have protected make old lighthouses objects of fascination.

My husband and I visited the Saugerties Lighthouse on the Hudson River this summer. The Hudson is one of the most beautiful rivers in the world and here, 110 miles north of New York City, where it wends its way through the Catskill Mountains, the river is surrounded by charming, low hills and lush foliage. The lighthouse is not far from where Henry Hudson stopped in Turkey Point in 1609 during his explorations along the mighty river. The first Saugerties lighthouse was constructed in 1834 at the mouth of the Esopus Creek off a swampy shore on land donated by Robert Livingston. The much larger existing lighthouse, completed in 1869, sits on a stone pier on 65-foot pilings in the water. The lights were initially illuminated by whale oil, later replaced by mineral oil and eventually electricity in 1947. Its oil lens was visible from ten nautical miles away.

The Saugerties Lighthouse

It was one of nine lighthouses from Albany to New York when the Hudson was a main commercial artery in the nineteenth century, providing transportation for passengers and essential goods with its direct connection to the Atlantic Ocean. Sailboats owned by the great estates that sprang up along the river also passed by Saugerties.

The lighthouse was automated in 1954 by the Coast Guard, doing away with the need for a lighthouse keeper. Twenty-one keepers had maintained the light tower and lived in the lighthouse over the years. The last keeper died a month after it was closed, reportedly from grief. The house fell into disrepair and was slated for destruction until local residents saved it. It has been restored and now functions as a bed and breakfast, allowing people to stay there for a high fee ($250 a night for two) and taste the life of a lighthouse keeper.

We did not stay, but during our short visit I noticed an item in a small exhibit about a girl who had lived in the lighthouse for much of her childhood. Ilah Kauffman’s father, Conrad Hawk, was the lighthouse keeper for 26 years. Judging from her description, it was an ideal place to grow up.

“When fog started, we wound up the bell, All night it would ring with this beautiful bong sound,” she told The Sunday Record in an interview on August 25, 1974. “Sometimes we’d help people whose boats were in trouble. I remember a yacht that broke down. After we helped, the owner sent us 15 pounds of candy. My, that was a windfall. My brother and I were only given a penny to spend every Sunday, so this was like manna from heaven.”

The family had no electricity and no indoor plumbing. They played cards and listened to music by the light of oil lamps. They grew a garden and preserved their produce for the winter ahead. The father harvested ice in the winter. Ilah was an accomplished knitter and ice skater, being able to skate right outside their door.

She remembered one Christmas when her father bought a phonograph from Sears Roebuck.

“We sat around the tree father cut on shore, lit with candles, listening to Caruso sing. We sat up until 2 a.m., listening, watching the candles drip. It was beautiful.”

Lighthouse keeper Conrad Hawk and his wife Thyra

Reading her story and viewing this magnificent river from the simple, but stately house surrounded by water, with large windows and warm brick, I was reminded that often the very best life is one that is somewhat deprived.

A lighthouse family must stay put. “We never had much money,” Ilah said, “but I don’t ever remember the lack of essential things.”

To have nature all around and the time to play cards, to knit, read and sing together seems far better than life in the middle of a rushed civilization with the questionable privilege of constantly being able to get up and go.

Lamentation over the Dead Christ (detail); Sandro Botticelli; c. 1495

GOOD TIMES are good. Fun is very fun. Joy and happiness are necessary.

But so is sorrow. Sorrow is necessary too. He who can not shed tears is lacking in compassion. For sickness, disappointment, loneliness, enmity, and death are always nearby. Sorrow opens our hearts to the truth of the human condition and to the mystical importance of the soul.

Some are chosen to feel more sorrow. This is an undeniable fact. Equality in the department of suffering does not exist. (If you are hanging out with people who cannot give a plausible explanation for this disturbing inequality, you are hanging out with the superficial.)

In this increasingly impersonal, alienated and artificial world, some may feel such intense sorrow, such a heavy load of sadness, that physical heart disease seems minor in comparison to this spiritual heart disease.

Sorrow of this kind is a grace from God, who draws the sorrowful closer to Him. He appoints to them the office of grief for a reason.

At the Foot of the Cross the second Eve fulfilled her destiny. She who had lived in human intimacy with God experienced complete sorrow, greater than any other, sorrow being a counterpart of love. This sorrow is the source of her great compassion, which is why millions of people have found consolation in suffering with her and appealing to her compassion.

But why? Why this inner suffering?

“What is the reason of all this suffering that exists in the world around us?” wrote the Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul in 1893 in commemoration of today’s Feast of the Seven Dolors of Mary, “[It] is a question that has been asked day after day, and year after year, and century after century, since the first human tear fell upon the unconscious earth. And the attempt to solve this enigma of mankind has founded schools of philosophy and philanthropy, systems of religion, and methods of life, from the dawn of human history and before it to the present hour. Yet the reason of sorrow, though it has escaped the search of mankind, is not far to seek–it is sin, and sin is everywhere.”

Sorrow, embraced willingly, can bring the greatest happiness of all because sorrow can be a form of penance and reparation.

When sorrow comes, it is an opportunity. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. They can be comforted by knowing that sorrow embraced repairs this fallen world.

Can the human heart refrain
From partaking in her pain;
In that Mother’s pain untold?
 

FELIX Kjellberg, the Swedish Youtube sensation who goes by the name PewDiePie (I’ve never heard of him before today), is the subject of a major news story.

Under pressure from his fans, PewDiePie, who reportedly has the largest Youtube audience in the world, rescinded a $50,000 donation to the Anti-Defamation League, which many of his followers claim is the country’s leading instigator of thought control and censorship. This is a big story because no one in popular culture publicly stands up to the ADL. But Kjellberg not only canceled the gift, he also apologized to his followers for even considering it. According to E. Michael Jones, this decision represents a “revolution in consciousness.” That may be an overstatement but it is true more and more people know that the ADL is a vicious organization that spies on Americans and ruins people’s lives when they express opinions the ADL doesn’t like. The ADL is a defamation league (not an anti-defamation league) deceptively operating under the mask of respectability, militantly supportive of Jewish nationalism while condemning nationalism for Americans, connected with organized crime, supported by political leaders of both parties and reminiscent of the Bolshevik Cheka, the secret police that terrorized Russians. The ADL terrorizes not just its opponents, but ordinary Jews too with scenarios of “hate” that cause paranoia and hysteria. The ADL is a major force behind censorship on the Internet, which is, again, why so many of PewDiePie’s fans were angered by his planned donation. The Internet has been purged in the last year of, among other things the ADL considers unacceptable, thousands of videos that explain and provide evidence for recent false flag mass shootings.

How was the ADL started? An adjunct of the international Jewish fraternal order and secret society (non-Jews excluded), B’nai B’rith, the ADL was started for the express purpose of defending murderer Leo Frank, who in 1913 [was accused of having] molested and brutally killed a 13-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, who worked in his factory. Frank [actually it was Frank’s defense team] then blamed it on a poor black janitor and cried “anti-semitism.” Ever since that time, the ADL has been doing the same, protecting Jewish criminals and smearing innocent Americans. Good for PewDiePie. Unfortunately, he too can certainly expect retaliation. It may happen now or it may happen later. But Jewish supremacists never forget. And they never forgive. Read More »

A LONGTIME reader sends an alternative scenario to the tragic life of Shakespeare’s Prince Hamlet. He wonders whether things would have worked out better if Hamlet had had a good therapist.  I’m not convinced, but it’s something for you to consider very seriously.

Cast: King Claudius, Queen Gertrude, Therapist, Hamlet (dual role with King)

Setting: Therapist’s office, three chairs, table. Therapist seated. Enter King Claudius and Queen Gertrude.

Therapist: The patient’s name?

Queen: Hamlet.

T: Please spell that.

Q: H-a-m-l-e-t.

T: First name?

Q: Prince.

T: Biological male?

Q: Oh, yes.

T: Health care provider?

Q: Denmark health-care system. Read More »

IN THIS interview from October, 2001, Patricia Ondrovic, an emergency medical technician with the New York City Fire Department,  describes what she saw after she arrived at the World Trade Center on 9/11. She describes numerous explosions in areas where there were no fires. Cars exploded in front of her. The lobbies of two buildings exploded.

FROM THE comments on this Brother Nathanael video:

“Lucky” Larry Silverstein, a strip club owner and indicted drug smuggler, “felt a compelling urge to own them” and so it was he came to obtain a 99 year lease on the entire world trade center [sic] complex on 24th July, 2001 for just $114 million, despite the WTC complex no longer being economically viable and in need of a cripplingly expensive demolition, being filled with asbestos, but the costs of doing this legally were prohibitive.

“Lucky” Larry admitted on camera that he began planning to build an entirely new World Trade Center 7 (WTC-7) building one year before the 9/11 attacks had occurred.

Despite “Lucky” Larry being a mere leaseholder of the buildings, he was the sole beneficiary of the insurance payouts. He increased the insurance policies, when he signed the lease two months before the attack happened. The insurance was for 3.6 billion dollars, but he found an obscure clause in the insurance policy which enabled him to claim twice, one for each “attack!” Larry Silverstein scored more than $4.5 Billion in insurance money as a result of the destruction of his complex.

“Lucky” Larry usually had breakfast in “Windows on the World” restaurant (107th Floor North Tower) every single morning – except for one – Larry was absent from this routine meeting on the morning of September the 11th. Read More »

ON THIS the 18th anniversary of 9/11, I join with all who remember that sad day, mourn those who died then and in its violent aftermath, and those who call attention to the discrepancies between the scientific evidence and the official story.

Good can come from catastrophe. God would not let it happen otherwise.

Start by learning more. Download an informative booklet on the science of 9/11 here.
 

S.K. ORR of Steeple Tea writes:

A tow truck driver

WHENEVER I see a woman working as a highway flagger or as a policewoman or a security guard, I always think a stupid, outdated thought:

Can’t a man do that?

Most of the traditionally male jobs women take are the easier ones. You never see women on the tops of roofs applying shingles or pruning trees 40 feet above the ground or at the tippy top of telephone poles. But even so, I still wonder,

Can’t a man do that?

Recently, I met a female tow truck driver for the first time. She loves her job, of course. I asked her if she didn’t have trouble getting 4,000 pounds of metal on a truck. “The machinery does most of the work,” she said, and she was right. I watched as she hoisted our car onto her flatbed.

I was very impressed. Still I wondered,

Can’t a man do that?

I am reminded of the writer Taylor Caldwell’s words about a woman who could never conceivably have been a tow truck driver — her Aunt Pollie:

“Aunt Pollie, clothed exquisitely and smelling delightfully of perfume, would go with her redoubtable Mama to twice-weekly matinees, then come home to prepare fragrant tea and bake luscious scones to be eaten with homemade strawberry jam. Though she had no modern washing-machine and used flat irons and hung out her laundry and had no vacuum cleaner and other “aids,” she managed to look serene and rested at all times, and had many hours of leisure every day.

Aunt Pollie, the Queen, a gentle and lovely wife, a “dependent” wife with no ambitions to do a man’s work in the world, would have been despised by feminists and Liberation Ladies. But Aunt Pollie was truly a woman, and not a grotesque neuter full of envy of the male sex — who have always had it much harder than women, with much less physical stamina, and have been conned by women for endless centuries to make life soft for them.”

— “Women’s Lib: They’re Spoiling Eve’s Great Con,” Taylor Caldwell

Can’t a man do that? 

THE MODERN WORLD hates innocence. It especially hates the innocence and serious limitations of Down Syndrome children, most of whom are now eliminated in the womb because they are seen as having no purpose in a hyper-careerist society. I mean, what’s the point in them living when they can’t go to college?

When that innocence, however, can be used to make Down Syndrome individuals figures of fun and perversion — well, then, the world applauds and suddenly sees purpose in their otherwise useless lives.

Exploiting the natural love of Down Syndrome adults for music and dance, an arts organization funded by the British government is marketing a theater troupe of adults who perform in drag. The troupe has performed in Europe and Canada, and supposedly a Republican congressman from Michigan  is the first to object. He refused to allow them to perform in a venue he owns. The Communist, Jewish ACLU has filed a complaint against him, stating he has violated the actors civil rights. Seriously, how sick can it get?

From The New York Times:

Over the past year, a small troupe of drag performers with Down syndrome has taken the stage in London, Stockholm, Oslo and Montreal, adopting flashy alter egos and basking in the crowd’s applause. They call themselves Drag Syndrome. Read More »

IN E. MICHAEL JONES’S latest book, a young man describes how he was cured (or so it seems) of all desire to view pornography.

It came to him in a flash. He was being used and exploited. Powerful interests want ordinary people to be preoccupied with sex and weakened by sin. Lust is a tool of political control.

Here is a letter the man wrote to describe his experience:

Dr. Jones,

I am writing anonymously because of the topic. I’d rather not even write this, but the joy of Our Lord demands that I do.

I’m male, good Catholic family. When I was 13, nearly 14, I discovered self-gratification. At the time I pretty much thought I had found my calling in life with self-gratification. I had some idea that the act was shameful, but I had no idea. I had seen some pornography, but I had enough sense to tell that porn – at least – is wrong. Perhaps a year-and-a-half later, my parents probably caught on to my self-gratification, and my dad dropped hints about how it’s a mortal sin. Read More »

A customer at Behrmann’s Tavern in Dutchtown, St. Louis calmly smoked a cigarette while a gunman pointed his weapon at him during an armed robbery last week.

ALAN writes:

One night last week, a thug with a gun robbed customers in Behrmann’s Tavern in south St. Louis. In 2005, a newspaper reporter described the tavern as “a quintessential corner bar across from St. Anthony of Padua Church in the heart of Dutchtown.” Quite right.  It has been there since 1933. It was there when my classmates and I crossed that intersection every day during our school years more than half a century ago. In those years, a Catholic supplies store was next to the tavern, followed by a shoe repair shop, a bicycle shop, a Post Office, and a barber shop. Catholic nuns who taught in the school lived across the street.

For 25 years, customers in the tavern were entertained by a woman pianist who played classic old songs like “Paper Doll” and “It Had to Be You.”

The tavern was pictured in a newspaper article in 2002, in which the writer claimed the area “offers a touch of Mayberry,” referring to the town  in “The Andy Griffith Show” from the 1960s. As soon as I read the article, I knew the writer was an idiot.

The article quoted owners of small businesses near the tavern as saying they “feel safe” walking in that neighborhood.

That was a fine example of kindergarten “journalism”:  Tell readers how people “feel;” don’t tell them the facts; don’t print the crime statistics; don’t print a comparison of crime statistics from that neighborhood from one year to the next and one decade to the next.

The writer quoted one resident as saying, “There’s a lot of architecture here, old buildings with good architecture. It’s like a little Mayberry…”

Are you laughing as hard as I did when I read that line? You should be. Now we know that the fictional town of Mayberry had an extremely low crime rate. Selective quotation by this journalist led readers to think that “a touch of Mayberry” could be seen even in a real-life neighborhood that—unlike Mayberry—had been made “inclusive, diverse, and multicultural” by force of law. That is what he and the people who paid him to write such things wanted their readers to believe. But was it true? Let’s weigh and consider that idea: Read More »

TRUMP’S job is to play the role of the bumbling villain, to give Democrats and leftists something to rage about, to make the Federal Reserve and the banking elites look like the “good guys”, and to lure conservatives into denying reality on the economic crisis until it is too late.

— Brandon Smith

Thanks to Steve and Fitzpatrick Informer for the links.

[This video makes some good points, but the idea that the Catholic Church and the Jesuits are Masonic is absurd and false since no institution has issued more warnings against Freemasonry than the Catholic Church. More papal encyclicals have been written about Freemasonry than any other single issue, all of them strongly condemning it and warning Catholics that Masons face an eternity of suffering. Catholics are automatically excommunicated from the Church upon becoming Masons. There is Masonic infiltration in the Church, especially in the last 100 years, and that’s not surprising as the Church is Enemy No. 1 for the brotherhood. Also, I disagree that this was a deliberate revelation by Trump. He seems to have revealed that he is a Mason — as if we didn’t know with his constant, obvious Masonic hand signals — in a spontaneous way.] Read More »

PAUL A. writes:

I was reading through some of your older posts, when I came across “The Hardships of the Single Life.”  This article really hit a chord with me, because I have thought a lot about this subject in the last few years. I’m a victim of my own poor choices. I have never really settled down somewhere, never invested in relationships, and have always lived alone, even in preference to having a roommate or two. Now I live in a smaller town in California and own my own business.  This is when the solitary nature of my existence really sunk in.

I live far away from old friends and family, and have no roots in the area in which I live. I have my own business, or rather my own job, as a repairman.  So I do my work all day, driving from location to location. It is not uncommon for me to speak to no one during the course of the day except customers. I have no co-workers, and no option to network through them. I have no family near, and no option to network through them. No girlfriend or wife, etc.

After work, I come home and do the paperwork side of the job: write invoices, order materials, work on taxes, insurance, etc.  It is quite a load. And, to the point of your article, I have to do everything for the household as well. If the dog or cat gets fed, I have to do it. All the shopping, I have to do.  All the cooking, cleaning, and yard work is my responsibility. I have to maintain the cars. If something is going to get done, I have to do it. Read More »