IT’S ABOUT TIME looks at outdoor portraits of prosperous British families in the 18th century. (See more posts under the same title here.)

The settings of outdoor Conversation Pieces reflected the image the client wanted to present, especially the ideal landscape or more-natural garden, which he wanted to portray as the upper-class setting of his everyday activities.  And so, these Conversation Pieces are a great way to see what those in the 18C aspired to have in their planned, personal landscapes. The subjects of outdoor Conversation Pieces were depicted enjoying a variety of genteel pastimes, whether or not they actually could do the activities. Elites, aspiring or long-established, were painted sharing common activities such as hunting, fishing, outdoor meals & musical parties. Dogs & horses were also frequently included as proper gentry accessories.

DR. E. Michael Jones, in the first 15 minutes of this video, does a nice job of demolishing Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s August grand jury report on clerical sex abuse. The report, which I wrote about here, here, and here, and which attorney generals across the nation are planning to imitate, was calculated and organized defamation of the Catholic Church (to the public — and Dr. Jones — the Vatican II church is the Catholic Church.)

A COMMENTER on the Internet echoes at least one of my points in a previous entry:

Each of the 50 State Governors has it within [his] power to recall [his] State’s two U.S. Senators and the allotment of U.S. Members of Congress in Washington D.C. back to his State in order to try them for high treason and high crimes against the Constitution of [his] own home State.

Each State Governor can cite their abdicating their Oaths to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America by their current and past refusal to repeal the unconstitutional Federal Reserve Act of 1913 which gave U.S. national sovereignty over to the …. private owners of the Federal Reserve central bank, and hence, gave away their State’s sovereignty as well.

Should the 50 State Governors refuse to recall his/her State’s Federal Government Representatives holed up within the District of Columbia …. tried for high treason and high crimes against his/her State, the Chief Justice of [the] State’s Supreme Court can issue his/her/their ‘Writ of Mandamus’ ordering the State Governor to recall their State’s Federal Government representatives to the U.S. Senate and U.S. Congress. Read More »

IF YOU ARE seeing ads on this site, please know that they have not been put there by me. Over the past week, my site has been repeatedly hacked. I hope to clear up the problem soon. (You may be getting the wrong font as well.)

TRUMP made false statements about Iran that are chillingly reminiscent of talk about Saddam Hussein by the George W. Bush administration before the Iraq War.

Daniel McAdams and Phil Giraldi discuss the details.

Iranian President Hassan Rohani also spoke before the United Nations General Assembly. His speech was generally ignored.

Most Holy Trinity Seminary, Brooksville, Florida

HERE IS A nice collection of photos of chapels in North America, South America and Europe maintained by Catholics who reject the Vatican II church and its claimants to the papacy since 1958 (including, of course, Francis, aka Jorge Bergoglio) and adhere to the traditional liturgy and all the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church.

Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen chapel in Uberlingen, Germany

CONCLUDE to apply thyself seriously to this most necessary mortification of thy interior, and more especially of thy own will and desires. This mortification is to be exercised, first, by denying to thy own will whatever it craves contrary to the will of God; secondly, by accustoming thyself in things indifferent often to contradict thy own will, and never to do anything merely to gratify thy own inclinations; thirdly, by curbing, even in things that appear to be good, that eagerness and hurry which nature, passion, and self-love are apt to prompt thee to; and setting before thy eyes, and quietly following on these occasions the will of God, and not thy own.

— Richard Challoner, 1807

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MANY READERS of this website are too wise to be caught up in the vulgar political entertainment  surrounding Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. And that’s what it is, distracting and vulgar entertainment, similar to the NFL. You can’t emerge from this show without catching some of the stink. For those wisely not paying attention, here is a short version of the plot, without the pornographic details: The Democrats say, “Bad boy! Bad boy! All men are evil!” And the Republicans say, “Due process! Due process! The Constitution of America! Feminism is evil!”

As Dr. Thomas Droleskey has said, “American politics and governance is just an exercise in theatrics.”

This latest melodrama shoved into sheepish brains  — in Orwellian America, R-rated political theater plays on public screens at gas stations and doctors’ offices — clearly illustrates that statement.

Many are being deceived or misdirected by all the fuss.

Any low smears against Kavanaugh, any denials of due process to him, ultimately serve the same purpose as the smears against Trump when called a “Nazi” or “white supremacist.” In other words, they result in the herd-like, unthinking defense by “conservatives” and patriots of a candidate who is not their friend.

Got that? Brett Kavanaugh is not your friend. He is not your savior, any more than the vulgar and lying demagogue, Donald Trump, is your friend or savior. Kavanaugh is just one more lackey for an entirely creepy establishment.

The Protestant commentator Chuck Baldwin writes: “A Republican-dominated Supreme Court (SC) gave us Roe v Wade, homosexual marriage and Obamacare. In fact, Republican appointments have dominated the SC for the last 45 years. All of this talk about Republican presidents appointing pro-life, constitutionalist, originalist justices is just so much hot air.

“Republican presidents have given us William Brennan, John Paul Stevens, Harry Blackmun (the man who authored Roe v Wade), Anthony Kennedy (the man who gave us homosexual marriage), and John Roberts (the man who gave us Obamacare). Trump’s appointment of Gorsuch (the man who made it illegal to deport illegal alien criminals) and now Kavanaugh are likewise in the mold of the above justices.

“Kavanaugh is a favorite of the establishment. Judge Andrew Napolitano rightly called Kavanaugh a “swamp pick.” He said that Kavanaugh was the “heart and soul of the DC establishment.” He said that Kavanaugh is “a big government guy.” Napolitano also quoted Kavanaugh as repeatedly saying that “the President [ANY President] can do no wrong.” Baldwin also points to what he says was Kavanaugh’s role in covering up the murder of Vincent Foster and his defense of mass surveillance.

The definitive piece on Judge Kavanaugh and why he offers merely the illusion of change, however, was written in July of this year, long before an apparently troubled woman came forward with hard-to-substantiate accusations against the judge. In Don’t Place Your Bets on Brett, Dr. Droleskey wrote:

Kavanaugh will be confirmed despite all of the huffing and puffing by Senate Democrats and despite all of the well-organized “demonstrations” and “protests” that have been staged by groups associated with and funded by the tentacles of billionaire George Soros.

My own first reaction upon reading the news of Brett Michael Kavanaugh’s nomination was, “Great. Trump has nominated a somewhat more “conservative” version Anthony McLeod Kennedy to replace Anthony McLeod Kennedy. Wonderful.” Obviously, this was sarcasm on the part of a displaced New Yorker. The point, however, is this: Brett Michael Kavanaugh has been part of the Washington, District of Columbia, establishment since his birth on February 12, 1965. Read More »

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LAWRENCE B. writes from Australia:

A couple of years ago, I attended an informal reunion of my small  group of friends from university. There was a group of us in those days — about 30 years ago — four boys and four girls who had socialized daily during the law course. The girls were the very best and most attractive our country had to offer. Therein lies the tragedy.

As late as the 70’s and ‘80’s, before our tertiary educaton system was opened up, only about 30 percent of Australians went to school beyond the age of 16 and of that cohort only a tiny fraction gained entry to our few universities which was determined solely by a single public exam. These four girls stood out on campus as bright and very physically  attractive. Feminism hadn’t turned toxic yet so they were also pleasant and feminine.  Of course they were determined to succeed in their legal careers so they planned to stay single for a few years. Read More »

ALAN writes:

In “Greetings,” the first post at The Thinking Housewife, you wrote in regard to the claim —increasingly popular in the modern world — that home life and the family are boring.

Your assessment of such claims was entirely valid, and I was prompted to remember it when I read the following passage in Anne Gertrude Snelling’s book A Vanished World (Syracuse University Press, 1964).  She was a teacher who grew up in upstate New York. She is writing about life on farms in that region in the late 1800s and early 1900s:

“What did the folks find to talk about after farm work and household matters and neighborhood gossip had been disposed of? Wasn’t it very dull? The world, as Robert Louis Stevenson observed, is dull only to dull people. The talk on farms was not bounded by stump fences or overflowing creeks. Besides the subjects that plain people have always occupied themselves with, there happened over and again, close at hand, events so unusual and disturbing that they offered unmeasured material for a lifetime of talk and reflection, the mind returning to them as experience brought a new point of view or age suggested a new interpretation.”

                                        [A Vanished World, p. 158; emphasis added]

I have never found life or the world to be dull in the least. On the contrary, I have always thought one lifetime is not enough to explore all the things available for us to learn, and to share what we discover in conversation or writing. Read More »

HUGH AKINS,  author and Vietnam War veteran, discusses his 2012 book Synagogue Rising with interviewer Judith Sharpe. A difficult and perplexing subject this is, but Akins, a traditional Catholic, has studied it exhaustively. Sharpe, from ISOC, is a terrific interviewer and makes the discussion easy for the uninitiated. Listen to the interview (subsequent segments can be found here; don’t miss Part Eight) and, better yet, buy the book.

IF YOU have this site bookmarked, you might want to change the url from https://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/ to https://www.thinkinghousewife/wp/. I have activated the security certificate (which I had for a while). You won’t get the right appearance under the “non-secure” url.

Hope that makes sense! Thank you.

Lincoln Cathedral

“WITH tolerable taxes, no state debt and no interest to pay, England enjoyed a period of unparalleled growth and prosperity [in the Middle Ages]. The average laborer worked only 14 weeks and enjoyed 160 to 180 holidays. According to Lord Leverhulme, a writer of that time, “The men of the 15th century were very well paid,” in fact so well paid that the purchasing power of their wages and their standard of living would only be exceeded in the late 19th century. A labourer could provide for all the necessities his family required. They were well clothed in good woolen cloth and had plenty of meat and bread.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the Anglo-German philosopher, confirms these living conditions in his The Foundations of the XIX Century:

In the thirteenth century. when the Teutonic races began to build their new world, the agriculturalist over nearly the whole of Europe was a freer man, with a more assured existence, than he is today; copyhold was the rule, so that England, for example — today a seat of landlordism — was even in the fifteenth century almost entirely in the hands of thousands of farmers, who were not only legal owners of their land, but possessed in addition far-reaching free rights to common pastures and woodlands.

During their spare hours many craftsmen volunteered their skills in building some of England’s magnificent cathedrals, which reinforces one of the basic tenets of Western civilization that without leisure time, the fostering of culture is not possible.”

— A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind, Stephen Mitford Goodson; Black House Publishing Ltd., 2014, pp. 26-27

“PRAYER ought to be humble, fervent, resigned, persevering and accompanied with great reverence. One should consider that he stands in the presence of a God, and speaks with a Lord before whom the Angels tremble from awe and fear.”

—- St. Mary Magdalen de’ Pazzi

FOR SOME reason, the font suddenly changed on this website when viewed in Google Chrome (and now in Safari). I probably did something wrong when making a backup.

If anyone knows how to fix it, I would appreciate your help. In the meantime, if it also appears small to you, use the “zoom in” function in “View.” You can also go to another browser.

Fruit Still Life, James Peale; 1824

WHY HAVE so many artists found apples compelling?

See my previous post, “An Apple with Character.”

FROM Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism, by Lawrence Auster (forthcoming from VDare Books):

What must be understood and resisted is the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness in all its forms, whether they be called leftist, liberal, conservative, or even Christian.  Whatever its particular ideological object, the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness believes not in God but in man and the perfectibility of human values.

In pursuit of that perfection, it reduces the whole of reality with its hierarchy of spiritual and temporal goods to one part of that reality, and treats that one part as the whole, while seeking to eliminate whatever stands in its way. The various secular “gods” resulting from this ideological operation go by many names — global democracy, humanity, unlimited personal freedom, economic equality, racial equality, gender equality, compassion, sexual liberation, economic growth, population control, immigration, race blindness, racial diversity, racial amalgamation. America itself is regarded as possessing godlike qualities, as we see in the idea of America as a “redeemer nation” or “universal nation.”

To the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness, America is not a nation under God, America (or rather the ideology they call “America”) is God. The core of the Secular‑Democratic Consciousness in all its forms is the deformation of the Christian religion into the Religion of Man.

But that is only the beginning of the disaster. With the advent of multiculturalism and anti‑racism, the Religion of Man has been further perverted into the Religion of Other Men and hatred of ourselves. The secularization of the Christian West has thus ultimately led to radical alienation and race suicide.

Therefore, while there may be other, non‑Christian ways of rebuilding a normal sense of peoplehood and racial identity among whites, I believe that the only way it can happen in the context of Western civilization is through the rediscovery of the classical and Christian understanding that we Westerners have lost.

It is this consciousness — the active force in Western civilization from the ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages to the American Founding — which sees reality whole. Seeing reality whole, it places all values, spiritual and secular, in their natural rank and order, accepting and negotiating the unavoidable tensions between them, rather than trying to escape the tension by making human values into gods. At bottom, this consciousness of wholeness can only arise from love of God and truth. It is through communion with God, and through living in a society consecrated to God, that we as individuals and as a society properly order ourselves, not only toward the perfect good of heaven, but toward the partial but indispensable goods of this temporal life, including the goods of family, nation, and race. It is only a godly people, living day by day in love of God, who can truly love existence as such and who are therefore able to preserve their particular existence as a people under God, while also recognizing the respective rights of other peoples.