FROM another good piece, this one on the subject of aristocracy by Michael Watson, at The Clifford Hugh Douglas Institute for the Study of Social Credit:

The dictionary description for ‘aristocracy’ means rule or leadership by the best and most virtuous. Social classes and ruling cultural elites are both a natural and necessary development in human societies and communities, even in societies that claim to be egalitarian, such as liberal democratic and communist regimes. Historic examples of this can be found in ancient Rome with the paterfamilias, in medieval Europe with knights and nobility, in ancient Japan with the samurai and daimyo classes or in the case of the indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific islands, their traditional tribal chiefs and elders. In all these aristocratic hierarchies and societies, the merchant bourgeois classes whose main focus is on the accumulation of money and speculation with the same were ranked amongst the lower classes and subjected to that of the ruling aristocracy in the form of a nobility, monarchical dynasty, or warrior class, whose main goal was the fulfilling of one’s duty towards the community or family, the development of cultural values, or the maintenance of familial honour or posterity, rather than just mere accumulation of money and commercial pursuits. But with the advent of mass mania for equality and democratic levelling in the last century, the rule by the aristocratic class and its attendant values have been replaced by rule of the bourgeois merchant class and high finance masquerading as a façade of political and social freedom and equality, since no human society can function without some sort of hierarchy (whether it be for good or evil). Famous English writer C.S. Lewis elaborated this point perfectly in his 1943 “The Spectator” essay titled “Equality”: “Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, atheletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison”.[ii] (more…)

SO instead of having a financial system that simply reflects, in a one-for-one correspondence, the production capacity and the flow of real wealth, we have a financial system that systematically underestimates them and that transforms money into a ‘rare commodity’ and finance into the determining factor. The symbol of our wealth, and of our ability to produce it, becomes more important than the reality of our wealth. And finance, as an institution, becomes master instead of servant, because, in order to overcome the artificial shortcomings and constraints that finance creates, we must appeal to finance on its terms and in accordance with its interests. This artificially induced dependence reverses the order that ought to exist between the financial system and the physical or real economy. In sum, the financial system is not a humble servant of the physical economy, of what we need, and of what we want to do with the physical economy. Instead, the physical economy, the real economy, is subordinated to the financial representation of the real economy. And that's the general problem with the economy.  If we were to imagine a dog representing the real economy and its tail representing the financial system, the current financial system, because it is structurally dishonest, allows the financial tail to shake the dog of the real economy. But this is a complete perversion of the due or correct order, the order required for healthy functioning. In this order, the dog…

FROM The Gatestone Institute: The bad news is that it appears to be one of many such operations in Asia dealing in the sale of women to China, where girls are a desirable commodity, due to decades of child-bearing restrictions and the apparent mass abortion of female fetuses. As Human Rights Watch reported last December: "The woman shortage is having harmful consequences in China and sometimes in neighboring countries... Traffickers prey on vulnerable women and girls, offering jobs in, and transport to, China. Then they sell them, for around $3,000 to $13,000, to Chinese families struggling to find brides for their sons. Once purchased, women and girls are typically locked in a room and raped repeatedly, with the goal of getting them pregnant quickly so they can provide a baby for the family. After giving birth, some are allowed to escape—but forced to leave their children behind. "There is evidence of similar patterns of bride migration and trafficking in Cambodia, North Korea, and Vietnam, and more may emerge from other countries bordering China. Importing women doesn't solve the shortage—it spreads it."

  WE LIVE in a world of noise. Some of it is outrageously called "music." John Playford (1623-1686) was an English music publisher and bookseller who collected the melodies and steps for many English country dances. These lovely dances continue to inspire. Here is one from his enormously popular book, The English Dancing-Master, which originally included 104 dances and tunes set to the fiddle. It went through many subsequent editions and expansions. Country dances of that time usually involved rows of couples walking or skipping energetically through maneuvers, with help from a caller. What a blast that must have been. This tune, performed by Les Witches, is a perfect May dance, and an antidote to the ugly noise you may have encountered today. Perhaps it will for a few moments erase your cares. Perhaps you will even imagine yourself dancing. Anyway, this is as close to rock and roll as you're going to get here. Here's another one if you really want to let go.  

ALAN writes:

The water is high on rivers in and around St. Louis. One day this week I walked along a path by a waterway and came upon a duck near water’s edge with eight ducklings meandering around her. I paused to watch them and stood motionless. They saw me but swam closer and then proceeded to explore the grass just a few yards from where I stood. They gave a fine show at no cost.

Several days earlier I sat on a bench in a green area with a lake and a fountain in suburban St. Louis. It was once called Audubon Park. Ducks and geese are always in evidence there. Three pairs of geese were swimming about on the lake. No doubt they were eyeing me, a solitary figure seated on that bench.

Within a few minutes they came closer and then walked up to the grass at lake’s edge. They made themselves comfortable not more than three yards from where I sat. For half an hour, they cleaned and preened themselves, sometimes balancing exquisitely on one leg.  Occasionally they talked with their companions across the lake.

They did not talk to me, nor I to them.  The only communication was telepathic. They knew I was no menace to them. We paid each other the supreme expression of respect:  We left each other alone. Then they sat down to relax. Some of them took a nap or semi-nap, resting their heads on their bodies but angled in such a way that they could keep one eye on the mysterious creature wearing a fedora and watching them quietly from his perch on that bench. Again: They put on a fine show at no cost. I have more respect for such birds than for 95 percent of the human race.

These are the kinds of things that most grown-ups ignore or dismiss as insignificant because they cannot abide activities that are not fast, loud, and flashy. Watching birds is definitely not fast, loud, or flashy. Children know better. Children find such things fascinating, and they are right.

Which leads me to the third ray of light:

Regarding the size of little children, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

           “The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels…..  When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature…..”

[The Defendant, Dodd, Mead, 1902, p. 116] (more…)

  SOME ARCHITECTS have informally submitted ideas for a new spire to Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The New York Times reports: Mr. [Stephen] Barrett said “the most interesting” designs he had seen so far were those that involved opening up the roof and creating a new public space. Those included turning the structure into some kind of garden with trees, echoing the lattice of ancient timber beams that used to make up the cathedral’s attic and that were known as “the Forest.” “That process of democratizing space is something we like and have done before,” Mr. Barrett said, though he speculated that the weight of trees could be too much for the cathedral.

  SEEING that thy soul is the temple of God, in which He doth lodge, do thou keep it void of all other things for Him alone. For alone He desireth to find thee, alone without thoughts —  alone without desires — alone without thy own will. Seek not for crosses indiscreetly, without the counsel of thy ghostly father, but dispose thyself rather to suffer, for love of Him, whatsoever He may please, and how it shall please Him. Do not thy will, but let God’s Will be done in thee. Let thy will be untied on all sides, so that thou desire nothing. And if thou desire any thing, yet so desire it,  that, if it take not effect, thou be not therefore afflicted, but remain in good quiet as if thou hadst not desired it at all. Then shalt thou be free indeed. The Quiet Of The Soul, Father John de Bovilla.

FEMALE HIGH school athletes face the disturbing phenomenon of having to compete against boys. The girls don’t know what to do because it is now unacceptable to state the obvious, which is that there really is no such thing as “transgenderism.”

All this seems like a good reason to give up super-competitive, obsessive, femininity-ruining academic athletics, which make girls into pseudo-boys anyway.

It once was possible to be feminine and athletic. The best way to fight the insane superstition of “transgenderism” is to be a masculine man or a feminine woman.

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PRO-family activists won a victory in Washington state last month against a bill that would have advanced the sex ed agenda in public schools, Salwa Bachar at Tradition in Action reports. What moral can we take away from this story as counter-revolutionaries? I end with the encouraging words of Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, taken from his classic book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: “The counter-revolutionary has no reason to be discouraged because of the fact that the great majority of men are not presently on his side. Indeed, an exact study of history shows us that it was not the masses who made the Revolution. They moved in a revolutionary direction because they had revolutionary elites behind them. If they had had elites of the opposite orientation behind them, they likely would have moved in the opposite direction. "An objective view of history shows that the factor of mass is secondary; the principal factor is the formation of elites. For this formation, the counter-revolutionary can always use the resources of his individual action, and can therefore obtain good results in spite of the shortage of material and technical means with which, at times, he may contend.”

MORE AND MORE Catholics are coming to the inescapable realization that Jorge Bergoglio, aka "Pope" Francis, is --- to use an old-fashioned, but indispensable word --- a heretic. Very few, however, have drawn the logical conclusions from this fact: 1. By divine law a public heretic cannot be pope. 2. The root of Francis's heresies lies in the Vatican II Council, which is responsible for the less obvious but no less outrageous heresies of his immediate predecessors, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. 3. Francis's open contempt for Church teachings on sexual morality has pushed many Catholics over the edge and prompted these latest accusations of heresy, but equally egregious are Vatican II heresies on the nature of the Church, on religious liberty, on ecumenism, on the historical events of the Incarnation and more, of which all the Vatican II claimants to the papacy, not just Francis, are guilty. The papal chair is empty. Papal succession continues in the material sense only. Jorge Bergoglio doesn't even want to be pope. See more from Fr. Anthony Cekada here and here. He writes: Vatican II represented the triumph of the modernist heresy, dominated as it was by theologians who were, as the Louvain professor Jürgen Mettepennigen said, “inheritors of modernism.” The poisoned seeds of theological error were sown during the Council with all its yes/buts, existentialist blathering, equivocations, ambiguities, work-arounds, silences, poisoned neologisms, redefinitions, false equivalences, destroyed distinctions and the rest. Bergoglio is…

FROM “The Culture of Tyranny” by Joe Sobran:

Thought-crimes differ from ordinary crimes in several respects.

First, they aren’t defined. Nobody knows exactly what “racism” is; it can mean anything the accuser wants it to mean. And it rarely refers to overt acts; usually it refers to the alleged thoughts or attitudes of the accused.

Second, nothing has to be proved — and since the word has no clear definition, nothing can be proved. So the accuser bears no burden of proof, as he would in cases of ordinary crimes. The accused is presumed guilty as long as the accusation is sufficiently strident. And, given the vagueness of the charge, he can’t prove he isn’t racist. (more…)

THE NEW YORK Times plays up the racial angle to the max with the reported birth of a son to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle:

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex — better known as Prince Harry and Meghan Markle — on Monday welcomed their first child, a boy, the first multiracial baby in the British monarchy’s recent history.

Reporters Ellen Barry and Palko Karasz hyperventilate over the implications for multicultural Britain:

For many, the new baby’s importance will be indelibly linked with race.

Britain is 87 percent white, but multiracial children make up its fastest-growing ethnic category, and will soon be the country’s largest minority group. The entry of Meghan Markle, the descendant of plantation slaves, into the royal family resonated deeply with many people of African descent, who almost immediately began to anticipate the birth of the couple’s first child.

The future is bright for America too. There is positive jubilation that the child is not white:

“It’s hopeful for people of my kids’ generation to see a princess of mixed race,” said Lise Ragbir, who is black and has written of her own experience raising a lighter-skinned child.

Repeatedly, beginning when her daughter was 6 months old, she said, strangers have approached her to ask, “Is that your baby?”

“It will be such a recognizable baby that it could shift people’s awareness,” said Ms. Ragbir, 45, a gallery director in Austin, Tex. “When one of the most famous families in the world does not have the same skin tone, people might pause before asking a stranger, ‘Is that your baby?’”

And then there’s this queer statement from the alleged father, Prince Harry:

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EVERY SPRING he would emerge from his underground cave and bust open the lattice. He would look out over his kingdom and plan his dining experiences, his digging adventures, his waddling trips through field and highway, his naps in the sun. He was as fat and sturdy as any creature who lives off the land could be. They don’t call them ground hogs for nothing.

Last week, we took down the old shed he used for cover. We are trying to upgrade — and the changes don’t include him.

Where will he go?

Fatso probably has little anxiety about his survival. I am sure he is still alive. I am sure he is as confident as he has always been. The sun and the earth will provide for him. And so will lots of hard-working gardeners. From spring to spring, he is at home in the world. His life is a lesson in domestic ease. (more…)

FROM the 1950 pamphlet “Know Your Enemy” by Maj. Robert H. Williams, an American military intelligence officer:

Revolutionary political activities in the [Russian] ghettos began to be organized in the early part of last century. So “promising” was the ghetto force that Heinrich Heine, Jewish-German poet, leader of the Communist youth and collaborator of Karl Marx, foretold with breathtaking, if sadistic, accuracy in the 1840’s the future destruction of Russia by Communism:

“Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pellets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy ….

“It would be war, the ghastliest war of destruction . . . The second act is the European and the World Revolution, the great duel between the destitute and the aristocracy of wealth; and in that there will be no mention of either nationality or religion; there will be only one fatherland, the globe, and only one faith, that in happiness on earth . . . How could the drama end? (more…)

E. MICHAEL JONES discusses his book Home Alone: A Neighbor’s Thoughts on Pete Buttigieg. Jones and Our Interesting Times host Tim Kelly talk about why South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is preparing to run for president. The book’s blurb on Amazon:

Presidential aspirant South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg poses the question “What would my next-door neighbors think of all this?” in his political autobiography Shortest Way Home. In Home Alone, E. Michael Jones, who has lived with his family on the very block where Buttigieg grew up since before Buttigieg was born, answers that question, and his answer is devastating. For “virtually every … claim in [his] book, the facts stubbornly resist the paradigm Mayor Pete brings to bear to interpret them,” writes Jones, as he picks apart the fallacies in Buttigieg’s self-serving autobiography. After reading Home Alone, you’ll never look at Buttigieg or his presidential hopes in the same way again.

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