TIMOTHY FITZPATRICK writes at his website Fitzpatrick Informer:

Trump’s over-the-top behaviour and persona makes a convenient caricature out of conservatism. It has provided a rallying point around which Leftists can punch holes in an easily deflatable strawman blow-up clown doll. This is only possible because Trump does not embody genuine conservative values. He is the creature of New York, Jewish yuppy culture and is led by his lust, greed, and narcissism. This caricaturization is being used the same way the Zionists used the caricature of Hitler to galvanize the fractured Jewish community. It lead to an intense period of cohesion for Hitler’s opponents, while he and the Nazis became more and more discredited. The Hitler caricature also enabled the Jewish money power to inoculate the world against any return to nationalism, which is the natural opponent of communism (and Zionism). The Soviets strive for the same goals, despite pretending to be nationalists themselves. Do you think the world will ever look at conservatism and nationalism with any validity, in the post-Hitler, Post-Trump future?

The fracturing, discrediting, and caricaturization of the Right has only encouraged the Left that their ideologies are correct. They can now push forward implementing their “truth” all over the world—more easily than had caricatures like Trump never been in power. Now there is the convenient pretext to save the world from any more monsters. Just accept their communism. Everything will be fine. Read More »

EVERY HOUR, taxpayers in the United States are paying:

*$11.6 million for military costs of war since 2001
*$10.05 million for interest on the war debt
*$7.99 million for “Homeland Security” costs
*$2.28 million for care of War on Terror veterans
*$32 million for total costs of war since 2001.

Source: National Priorities Project

“ST. Thomas Aquinas was one day visiting St. Bonaventure, and asked him from what book he had drawn all the beautiful lessons he had written. St. Bonaventure showed him the image of the Crucified, which was completely blackened by all the kisses that he had given it, and said: “This is my book whence I receive everything that I write; and it has taught me whatever little I know.”

— The Rev. Reginald Walsh, Meditation on the Passion, 1922; Kindle Edition.

The Tree of Life; 17th century

“Do not weary thyself in vain; for thou wilt never succeed in possessing true spiritual sweetness and satisfaction, unless thou first deny all thy desires.”

—-  St. John of the Cross

FROM G.K. Chesterton’s Heretics (1905):

The word “heresy” not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word “orthodoxy” not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: “The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man’s opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters—except everything.”

ELLEN BROWN disputes the common view that the U.S. Postal Service is failing because of the Internet. The post office, she says, has been deliberately targeted by powerful commercial forces:

WHEN my husband was a boy in the working class city of Chester, Pa., he was in the choir at St. Michael’s School. During Holy Week, the choir would sing, among other things, Giovanni da Palestrina’s Adoramus te, Christe, a choral version of the Latin prayer recited during the Stations of the Cross. St. Michael’s didn’t have many of the frills schools have today and my husband led a rough-and-tumble life with his friends on the streets, but he encountered one vital thing there: beauty.

Children need beauty. Even though they can’t fully understand it, beauty seeps into their souls and finds a permanent home there. It gives them a taste for the truth and the love that underlies all things.

Adoramus te, Christe
Et benedicimus tibi
quia per sanctam crucem tuam
redemisti mundum.
Qui passus es pro nobis,
Domine, Domine, miserere nobis. Read More »

FRANCIS passes up the opportunity to explain Catholic reverence for the body. Read More »

ALAN writes:

One day I was reading about people’s memories of growing up in a certain neighborhood. One woman remembered:

“How friendly people were, and how open everything was. People left their doors unlocked. One lady who lived in a big white house put on a scary costume and handed out candy to children who came to her door on Halloween. It was all very friendly. In front of another house, children had a lemonade stand.” Are these the memories of the fictitious town in “Leave It To Beaver?” No, but they could be. Are they the memories of the place where I lived in boyhood? They might be, but they aren’t. They are the memories of people who grew up on Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills in the 1940s-‘50s.

They are the memories of people like Joan Benny, Jack Benny’s adopted daughter. They lived at 1002 North Roxbury Drive. Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz lived next door, and it was she who handed out the candy. Other neighbors included James Stewart and Rosemary Clooney. [See Todd Purdum’s “The Street Where They Lived,” Vanity Fair, April 1999]

Much of America was like that at one time. Police officers who grew up in the same neighborhoods of St. Louis where I did remember many residents leaving their doors unlocked. That, of course, was at a time before the Communist-engineered destruction of city neighborhoods and strong Catholic parishes. Read More »

NICK writes:

Just a thought on your article this morning: should we grant the assumption that beta males are in fact inferior to alpha males?

I don’t like these descriptions, because they seem too grounded in a more animalistic reality but, as you point out, it is a popular theme on the American political Right of today.

Alpha males are typically rugged men who have no serious allegiance or loyalty to anyone else. They don’t typically like order, law or responsibility. They operate on a “dog eat dog” mentality and usually are very opportunistic in the pursuit of their own self-defined concept of happiness. In their ethical lives, they’re utilitarian.

Great examples of Alpha males: dead-beat fathers, drug dealers, playboys, wall-street investors, politicians, lawyers, etc.

None of these are typically exemplars of a good life, except when “good life” is defined by modern standards. People who boldly lived their lives as they saw fit to do so regardless of any of the supposed expectations rooted in their nature as men (similarly, women are “empowered” and “free” when they live like their lives like this). Read More »

SEE Jim Fetzer’s listing of “ten reasons for concluding that the Parkland Shooting was a staged event, planned long in advance, which included the use of student ‘crisis actors’ faking wounds they did not incur and even teachers and doctors making false claims about the death of a fellow teacher (who was no longer at the school) and about wounds that healed in record time (in violation of the laws of physiology and medicine). ”

Madonna and Child, Fra Filippo Lippi

DREW EMMONS describes his journey from life as a Protestant pastor to the Vatican II religion to the true Catholic Church.

“The Ultimate Deep State goal is worldwide Totalitarianism/Socialism but they need to do a few things first:

1. Take away our guns so we can’t resist their abuse.

2. Destroy the American economy to get us to agree to Socialism.

3. Destroy the family unit/institution.”

Source Read More »

Melting Snow, Edward Willis Redfield

OUR SINGING STRENGTH
— Robert Frost

It snowed in spring on earth so dry and warm
The flakes could find no landing place to form.
Hordes spent themselves to make it wet and cold,
And still they failed of any lasting hold.
They made no white impression on the black.
They disappeared as if earth sent them back.
Not till from separate flakes they changed at night
To almost strips and tapes of ragged white
Did grass and garden ground confess it snowed,
And all go back to winter but the road.
Next day the scene was piled and puffed and dead.
The grass lay flattened under one great tread.
Borne down until the end almost took root,
The rangey bough anticipated fruit
With snowball cupped in every opening bud.
The road alone maintained itself in mud,
Whatever its secret was of greater heat
From inward fires or brush of passing feet. Read More »

“IF ONLY I had gotten my hands on your mother.” (Warning: Sickening. Not for the sensitive.)

Source