FROM “How Donald Trump Threw Peace and Prosperity Under an AIPAC Bus” by Phil Butler:

Shortly after 11:00 AM, Wednesday August 2, 2017 US President Donald Trump declared full scale economic war on Russia. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is joined by millions of us who’ve now lost all hope of peace and reconciliation in the world. Cold War II is on.

Dmitry Medvedev attacked Trump’s decision to sign the bill in the same way most of us analysts will, chastising the US President after his clear bow to a US Congress unified in its hysteria against Vladimir Putin’s Russia. But the Russian Prime Minister did not delve into just “why” Trump is praying to the altar of neo-conservatism today. Trump feigned disagreement with sections of the law his team said are “unconstitutional”, but the force behind these sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea is hidden. Let me enlighten you on what is really taking place in Washington.

Two days ago, a close colleague of mine was on the line from Greenwich, Connecticut to discuss my upcoming book when the conversation turned to these new Russia sanctions. My colleague related a story from Capital Hill and an insider who explained the vote on the sanctions law. The gist of this insider’s revelation was that the overwhelming “yes vote” in Congress indicated one powerful player behind the curtain – America’s pro-Israel lobby AIPAC.

When I heard AIPAC stood behind, my mind immediately reverted to images and sound bites of Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. Their mutual gratification society handshakes, the syrupy sweetness of the Israeli’s recollections on young Trump – and then I thought on the Saudi arms deal and the wider frame of the Arab Spring. Sorry to consolidate so many facets here, but if Trump and all of Washington has acquiesced totally to the will of AIPAC, then America is all done. Looking again at Russia’s Medvedev:

“Trump’s administration has demonstrated total impotence by surrendering its executive authority to Congress in the most humiliating way.”

The point of this new sanctions law is revealed simply. If AIPAC controls the Unites States Congress, and if the President of the United States has surrendered his executive authority to that body, then the Israeli lobby controls the Government of the United States – lock stock and barrel. In other words, a foreign sovereign nation and ideology rules America – and it rules it with impunity.

Link here.

Here is more analysis by F. William Engdahl, who writes:

The ever-so-wise members of the Congress of the United States have just passed one of the most bizarre pieces of legislation in US history. Unilaterally, it makes illegal and severely punishable investments by European companies in international energy projects where Russia is involved. But it does far more. Unlike earlier US sanctions acts, the EU countries were not even consulted on the new act. It may well be that the bill, HR-3364: Countering Americas Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (sic) and its Senate counterpart will mark the irreversible decline of the United States as a global power and forge new ties between Russia, China, Iran and, yes, the major states of the EU including Germany.

FROM a sermon on The Transfiguration of Jesus by Fr. Francis Xavier Weninger, 1876:

THE garments which clothe our soul, are the good works which we practise, according to our station in life. If each one of these were performed with the purest intention, and were free from every stain of imperfection, what an adornment they would prove to be, how they would embellish the soul, and what a gain they would be for heaven! Unfortunately this is seldom the case. There are few of our works whose brightness is untarnished by sin.

We will consider today, particularly, the stains which deface our daily works, and meditate upon the best means of avoiding and guarding against them. Mary, thou who, according to Holy Writ, standest robed in garments of gold, before the throne of the Most High, thou, purest of the pure, in thought and deed, grant that we, taught and guided by thee, may gain strength to free ourselves from every stain of imperfection and sin! I speak in the most holy name of Jesus, to the greater glory of God.

St. John, speaking in the Apocalypse of the saints in heaven, says: “They were clothed in white robes.” These white garments and these shining, precious material of which they are made, says he, are righteousness and good works. This material is made up principally of our daily works. For, in order to become holy it is not necessary to perform great and astonishing outward deeds. The Almighty has not chosen or called every one for such a career; hence every one has not received the divine grace which it requires. As to those great works of which we read in the lives of the saints, they were not the means of making them what they were; it was, rather, the perfection with which they performed their daily duties which made them so rich in merit.

A friend of St. Francis de Sales used to say of this saint, that he did nothing unusual, and yet all that he did seemed unusual, on account of the perfect manner in which it was performed. And what are the stains which cling to our daily works and deface them, and often even totally destroy them, by robbing them of all merit for the life to come? They are these:

First, the stain of indolence, arising from a want of energy to rise early, and always at the same time, in order to say our morning prayers and to implore God to protect and bless us during the day. All who are indolent in rising, who begin the day slothfully and without devout, earnest prayer, stain thus early in the morning the robes of their soul. Read More »

AS IF women weren’t demoralized enough when it comes to sacrificing ambition for motherhood and home, New York Times writer Karen Rinaldi comes up with a new twist on the Don’t-Waste-Your-Life-At-Home argument.

She says motherhood is essentially selfish.

Rinaldi, the author of The End of Men, writes:

Christ in the Storm, Rembrandt

He who is afraid of falling distrusts his own strength, avoids as much as possible all dangerous occasions, and recommends himself often to God, and thus preserves his soul from sin. But the man who is not fearful, but full of self confidence, easily exposes himself to the danger of sin: he seldom recommends himself to God, and thus he falls. Let us imagine a person suspended over a great precipice by a cord held by another. Surely he would constantly cry out to the person who supports him: Hold fast, hold fast; for Gods sake, do not let go. We are all in danger of falling into the abyss of all crime, if God does not support us. Hence we should constantly beseech him to keep his hands over us, and to succour us in all dangers.

— St. Alphonsus Liguori

Family Reunion for Alex Kafri. Haaretz

ALEX KAFRI “was given to believe” that his father’s family had been entirely wiped out in German gas chambers during World War II, Haaretz reports.

But Kafri recently learned after his father’s death that in fact he had many relatives on his father’s side. A huge reunion took place in London last week. This is a happy story, folks.

May there be many more of these happy reunions.

This story is as happy as the admission by Polish and Jewish authorities that after years of reporting that four million Jews were killed at Auschwitz, no more than 1.1 to 1.5 million inmates of various religions died there. The whole world should rejoice that millions did not perish there! Read More »

ALAN writes:

George Orwell wrote:

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”

But naked brutality would be needed only to tyrannize people who can recognize evil and summon the will to oppose it. In the years when Orwell wrote, many people could do both. Today, most Americans can do neither.

In place of naked brutality, I see a somewhat different vision of the future: It stares at us wherever we look—in public places, on public transit, in newspapers, in magazines, on television, on the Internet, in commerce, in advertising, in retail stores. It is the image of a young feminized woman having “fun” and wearing a perpetual, vapid, adolescent-witted smile: Multiculti mush and poison dished out by the Feminoid Sisterhood fronting for Nanny Government.

Equally bad are the endless announcements on public transit instructing passengers to “use the sidewalks and crosswalks for safety”, recited in computer-generated recordings designed to mimic a woman’s voice.

Imagine a “partnership” of Feminoids and Nanny Government instructing us for our own good.
I need a good laugh: Tell me that Washington, Jefferson, and the other early Americans would have listened to such announcements and said, “O Thank you, benevolent Nanny Government, for giving us those instructions. We are so dumb that we would have walked directly into a stampede of horses were it not for those instructions provided by such a sweetheart government.”

The man whom the Lord afflicts in this life has a certain proof that he is dear to God. ”And,” said the angel to Tobias, ”because thou wast acceptable to God, it was necessary that temptations should prove thee.” (Tob. xii. 13.) Hence, St. James pronounces blessed the man who is afflicted: because after he shall have been proved by tribulation, he will receive the crown of life.” (Jam. i. 12.) 

 — St. Alphonsus Liguori, from his sermon “On the Advantages of Tribulations”

(More audio sermons and biography)

IT was the largest gathering yet on the anniversary of the assassination of Tsar Nicholas II and his family, an event that foreshadowed the murder and mayhem to come under Bolshevism. Here’s a story about Russia that wasn’t covered in America’s insane Russia-hating media. A few weeks ago in Yekaterinburg in the Sverdlovsk region, an estimated 60,000 Russians participated in a procession to mark the 99th anniversary of the assassinations. At dawn on July 17th, the tens of thousands marched to the forest where the mutilated remains of the royal family had been buried.

The Tsar and his family a few years before their deaths in 1918

Shortly before midnight on July 17, 1918, the royal family — Tsar Nicholas II; his wife, Alexandra; their daughters Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia; and their son Tsarevich Alexei were taken to a basement room of the house in the Urals where they were imprisoned. While they were posing for what they thought would be a photograph portrait, they were shot and stabbed with bayonets. The entire family has been canonized by the Orthodox Church.

The executioners entered the room and read out the order for their execution. Saints Nicholas and Alexandra died under the hail of bullets, but the children did not die right away. They were stabbed and clubbed with the butts of rifles. Their bodies were taken to an abandoned mine, cut into pieces, then piled in front of the mine. Sulphur and gasoline were poured on the bloody mound and set on fire. When the fire went out two days later, whatever remained of the bodies was thrown into the mine and grenades were tossed into it. Then the ground was plowed so that no trace of the disposal of the bodies remained. [Source]

Lenin and Yakov Sverdlov ordered the executions. Jacob Yurovsky, head of the local Cheka, or state secret police, led the operation. Read More »

JOHN LEAR is a veteran pilot and the son of Bill Lear, inventor of the Lear jet. He is one of numerous pilots who have come forward and said the official version of 9/11 cannot be true. In his lengthy affidavit from 2008, he maintained that passenger planes did not hit the Twin Towers.

Other pilots analyzed the reported events in the above video.

FIRM evidence that Russia hacked the U.S. election does not exist. Most Americans probably don’t even care. But say it often enough — “Russia hacked the U.S. election,” “Russia is undermining our democracy” — and it becomes true.

A Congress of dumbbells is now leading us to war. Millions of ordinary Russian people will be hurt by the new sanctions voted for by Congress and awaiting Trump’s signature.

The White House says President Donald Trump will sign legislation implementing tough new financial sanctions against Russia.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says in a statement that Trump read early drafts of the bill and “negotiated regarding critical elements of it.”

She says the president has “reviewed the final version and, based on its responsiveness to his negotiations, approves the bill and intends to sign it.”

The legislation includes language that bars Trump from easing or waiving the additional penalties on Russia unless Congress agrees. It also imposes financial sanctions against Iran and North Korea.

Moscow has responded by ordering a reduction in the number of U.S. diplomats in Russia and closing the U.S. Embassy’s recreation retreat. [Source]

Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute comments, “They’ve established as a fact on the ground that Russia hacked the election and therefore no one needs to question it…. People in Congress are not very well informed.”

Trump has been backed into a corner. “We have passed the line of rationality,” says Former US diplomat Jim Jatras. “They [Congress] want to take away from the president one of his most solemn duties as the Commander in Chief, which is the conduct of affairs with foreign states and they want basically to put the Mark of Cain on Russia .. not a declaration of war, militarily, but a political war.”

Ron Paul writes of hostility toward Iran and North Korea: Read More »

BEWARE of the recently-released movie The Keepers about the 1969 murder of the Baltimore nun, Sister Cathy Cesnik.

See more at TheMediaReport.com.

WHAT HAPPENS in the Orthodox Jewish community when a family accuses someone of sexually molesting a child?

The victims are shunned, bullied and persecuted in many cases, as the community at large tries to prevent public airing of the crimes and criminal charges. See this unusually probing 2012 piece in The New York Times. From the article:

Abuse victims and their families have been expelled from religious schools and synagogues, shunned by fellow ultra-Orthodox Jews and targeted for harassment intended to destroy their businesses. Some victims’ families have been offered money, ostensibly to help pay for therapy for the victims, but also to stop pursuing charges, victims and victims’ advocates said.

“Try living for one day with all the pain I am living with,” Mr. Jungreis [father of a victim], spent and distraught, said recently outside his new apartment on Williamsburg’s outskirts. “Did anybody in the Hasidic community in these two years, in Borough Park, in Flatbush, ever come up and look my son in the eye and tell him a good word? Did anybody take the courage to show him mercy in the street?”

A few blocks away, Pearl Engelman, a 64-year-old great-grandmother, said her community had failed her too. In 2008, her son, Joel, told rabbinical authorities that he had been repeatedly groped as a child by a school official at the United Talmudical Academy in Williamsburg. The school briefly removed the official but denied the accusation. And when Joel turned 23, too old to file charges under the state’s statute of limitations, they returned the man to teaching.

S., a female Indian immigrant, writes:

Scene: Inside the subway on a hot day in New York, in a packed car with no air conditioning.

Participants: Me, average New Yorkers and a Chinese father and daughter pair seated opposite me. The girl is dressed in a skirt and blouse.

A white girl in her early 20s boards the car. She is dressed in a see-through white, cotton vest with a colored bikini under it and denim shorts. She proceeds to take off the vest and ties it around her waist, presumably because she is melting from the heat.

Chinese Father erupts in a low volume, jaw-grinding volley of Mandarin, pointing towards the white girl and then gesticulating a slapping motion, presumably implying that should his girl ever be in a state of undress in a packed subway he would spank her. Meanwhile the men are staring at the beautiful, educated young women, possibly a student in an elite institution, in her bikini.

Liberalism is doing away with your values while allowing minorities to stick to their own. Read More »

Read More »

THE fashion designer Coco Chanel (1883-1971) played a powerful role in changing women’s fashions. One of her most significant influences involved pants.

It is hard today, when most women wear pants all the time, to conceive of how revolutionary was this change, which allegedly began when she started wearing sailors trousers on the beach in the French Riviera. Up until the 1930s, women in the West universally wore dresses and skirts. If you look at photos of street scenes in those years, there are no women — none — in pants.

Chanel in 1928

Interestingly, Chanel later expressed regrets:

Although during the war women often had to wear trousers when working in traditionally male jobs, Chanel played a huge part in accelerating their popularity as a fashion item. While at the society beach resort of Deauville she chose to wear sailor’s pants instead of a swimming costume to avoid exposing herself, and the style spread quickly as her legions of followers emulated her. In the end, the designer regretted how her careless decision affected the course of fashion history. Aged 86 she said: “I came up with them by modesty.  From this usage to it becoming a fashion, having 70% of women wearing trousers at evening dinner is quite sad.” (Source)

The wearing of pants is almost universally considered today to be a form of liberation. But others, rarely quoted, maintained back then that it was a sign of a growing inferiority complex.

The skirt or dress was an emblem of a woman’s inherent dignity. Like a priest’s vestments, it had an almost ceremonial quality. Here are some early dresses designed by Chanel, who later popularized the more austere black dress:

The wearing of pants signified a desire to be like men. It represented an envy of men — and envy is always based in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the envying one.

Guiseppe Cardinal Siri wrote in 1960 on the effects on the psychology of women in a pastoral letter:

Masculine clothing changes the psychology of women

In truth, the motive that impels women to wear the clothing of men is not always to imitate him, but rather to compete with the man who is considered stronger, less encumbered and more independent. This motivation shows clearly that masculine dress is a visible support to bring about a mental attitude of being ‘like a man.’ Further, since the existence of man, the clothing a person wears conditions, determines and modifies the gestures, attitudes and conduct of a person. Thus, just by its wearing, the clothing comes to impose a particular state of spirit in the person.

Permit us to add that a woman who always wears the clothing of men more or less indicates that she is reacting to her femininity as if it were inferior, when in fact it is only different. The perversion of her psychology is clearly evident.

These reasons, added to many others, are sufficient to warn us of how mistaken is the thinking of women who wear men’s dress.

Today it seems that women will always wear pants. But it is inevitable that they rediscover and take pride in the distinctiveness of femininity. Read More »

— Fr. Ronald Knox Read More »

S.K. writes:

Once again, you’ve touched on a powerful topic. Tattoos, which I am not in the slightest a fan of, are ubiquitous. I don’t like them on women especially; none at all. Find a woman (young, mature or even old) that doesn’t have at least three – if you can. I remember when they started becoming popular with all social classes in the 90’s. Prior to that I only noticed former military, bikers, hoodlums, etc., to have tattoos and even with them they were usually kept to a minimum of one and and kept out of sight. Then the yuppies, the college kids, everybody and their mother basically started getting tattoos.

You wrote:

“A young woman who sliced some bread I bought yesterday was wearing a nose ring. She seemed a nice, polite girl, but I wondered, was she afraid to seem ordinary? Why? Does she take some weird pleasure in shocking and repelling?”

She is mindlessly following her peer group, or she feels small in a big world and wants to signal that she is here too, and that she matters and should be paid attention too as well. I recently chatted up a lovely young woman that had a nose ring. I had not noticed it at first but once I did it sort of bothered me. She was so down-to-earth and sweet, and yet this thin strip of metal was jarring me. Read More »