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MICHAEL SNYDER writes:

Never before in human history has our world been so saturated with debt.

And what all of this debt does is that it funnels wealth to the very top of the global wealth pyramid.  In other words, it makes global wealth inequality far worse because this system is designed to make the rich even richer and the poor even poorer.

Every year the gap between the wealthy and the poor grows, and it has gotten to the point that eight men have as much wealth as the poorest 3.6 billion people on this planet combined…

Eight men own the same wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity, according to a new report published by Oxfam today to mark the annual meeting of political and business leaders in Davos.

This didn’t happen by accident.  Sadly, most people don’t even understand that this is literally what our system was designed to do.

Today, more than 99 percent of the population of the planet lives in a country that has a central bank.  And debt-based central banking is designed to get national governments trapped in endless debt spirals from which they can never possibly escape.

Read more here.

JOHN PHILIP SOUSA’S “Manhattan Beach March” — for this July Fourth weekend

BEING POOR is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Losing your job is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Imprisonment is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Murder is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

Cancer is not the worst thing that can happen to you.

There is only one really bad thing that can happen to you — losing your soul.

When man turned against God, he fled from His face. He suffered for centuries in confusion and uncertainty.

God could have left it that way, but instead He repaired the rupture between His creatures and Himself. He offered shelter. And it began in the womb of a single woman. For many this mystical event is nothing but fable. If all you see is the world before you, then you are blind to what is not visible.You are as crippled as — no, more crippled than — the man who is physically blind. You cannot see an entire dimension of reality.

Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing.
You reign now in Heaven with Jesus our King.

Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria! Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria!

In Heaven the blessed your glory proclaim;
On earth we your children invoke your sweet name.

Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria! Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria!

Your name is our power
Your virtues our light

Your love is our comfort
Your prayers are our might

Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria! Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria!

MANY nationalists of the “Alt-Right” romanticize paganism and condemn Christianity as effeminate. Pointing to the anti-Catholic “Pope” Francis, they rightly condemn his support for open borders, but find in it a ready excuse to ignore the Church. They seem willfully ignorant of its historic support for nationalism, the fact that it was Christian knights who once defended Europe’s borders, the warnings by pre-Vatican II popes of the heresies of modernists and the failure of Francis to accept Catholicism! Some of these neopagans actually believe Europe will be restored by a return to Norse gods — or lots of manly passion. Many, I am convinced, want to be libertines and nationalists or want to coast on waves of unrestrained nationalist feeling without the hard work of self examination.

Some are Darwinists who lack wisdom and common sense. Alt-Right pagans will never possess the moral fiber to restore Europe. Heck, they can’t even produce big families.

A blog called Catholic Kulchur responds to this trend in “An Open Letter to the Alt-Right from a Traditionalist Catholic.” Though the author accepts the validity of Francis as pope, a view which somewhat undermines his arguments, he makes an important argument with eloquence:

The Alt Right is rightly disgusted with the buddy Jesus, high-fiving Evangelical Catholicism, but they are wrong to think this sentimental and effeminate Christianity is the Christianity that was given to the Irish by St. Patrick or to the Slavic people by Saints Cyril and Methodius. The Christianity of the Beowulf poet or that of St. Thomas Aquinas, himself a member of an aristocratic Norman-Italian family, is not the Christianity of Pope Francis or Rick Warren.  For two millennia, the borders of Europe were defended by Christian knights who shed their blood fighting waves of migrants seeking to chain our ancestors under the yoke of Islam. Read More »

J.S. writes:

From “The Problems with Wonder Woman” by Danusha V. Goska at Frontpage Mag:

Let’s finally admit that women discriminate in favor of pretty women just as surely as men do. Women reject big-boned, dowdy, nerdy females, as high school friends, as potential hires, when buying dolls, as heroines of novels and main characters of films every bit as much as men do. So-called feminists castigate and lecture men for participating in evolution’s inevitable preference for the pretty and the powerful, but women do it themselves, to themselves and each other. I remember a “feminist” friend practically ululating about what a thrill it was to see Gloria Steinem speak in person. I drilled this feminist about what Steinem actually said in her talk that was so inspirational. All she could say was that Steinem was over sixty and still could “rock” tight, black leather pants. We women forge our own chains.

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

Your recent point that modes of female dress and the depiction of female physicality carry potent symbolic power and reflect a society’s health took me back to a certain desk at a Christian Brothers school at Bondi Beach years ago when the same point was made to my classmates and me by a Brother who had, in the ’60’s, established a school in tribal Papua New Guinea.

He related that one evening he screened a film for the boys and their parents where all of the mothers, quite in keeping with their  societal custom, were either topless or almost so.

All was well until a scene appeared around a pool where Western women were shown in what were, for those days, somewhat revealing bikinis, but which of course would be considered quite modest nowadays.

The native mothers did not hesitate but rose as one and ushered their husbands and sons out of the room. Read More »

The Young Botanist, Paul Peel; The Young Botanist 1888-90

JUDGING from the artistic record, it is possible to enjoy the beach with clothes on.

See more beach paintings here.

The Beach, Laura Knight; 1908

Too Timid, Edward Henry Potthast (1857-1927)

Girl with a Sailboat, Edward Charles Tarbell (1862-1938)

Study of a Sparrow, Giovanni Di Udine

ANXIETY is not a virtue. Worry is not wholesome. Anxiety and worry are crushers of souls.

Sometimes people ask, “What can I do? What can I do about the state of the world?”

Here’s what you can do. Banish anxiety from your life. You don’t need a doctor to do it. You don’t need counseling. You don’t need a prescription. You need a spirit of trusting, childlike surrender to God’s will. You need to give up the stubborn pretension that you are in charge.

To focus soberly on the tasks before us is necessary. But the picking at scabs, the roaming in the fog, the confinement in the cage of worry is positively harmful. 

Are you worried about the state of the world?

Are you worried about poverty or illness?

Are you worried about finding a spouse?

Are you worried that you will be stuck in a job you hate forever?

Are you worried about the future of your children?

Are you worried about old age and death?

Anxiety is excessive focus on the past or future, which become fields of speculation and imagination. Meanwhile the present is before us. We have much work to do, we have many steps to take.

The anxiety-afflicted need to spend some time meditating upon God’s love. Pray for the grace to understand it.

Be not therefore solicitous for tomorrow; for the morrow will be solicitous for itself. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.

Think of the sparrow. He is frail, humble and small. And yet he survives this chaotic world.

Behold the birds of the air, for they neither sow, nor do they reap, nor gather into barns: and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not you of much more value than they? And which of you by taking thought, can add to his stature by one cubit? And for raiment why are you solicitous? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they labour not, neither do they spin. But I say to you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed as one of these. And if the grass of the field, which is today, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, God doth so clothe: how much more you, O ye of little faith? [Matt: 6:26-30]

Worry and anxiety are spiritual diseases. Anxiety is alienation from truth and beauty. It’s downright rude. As if He didn’t know what was best.

Cure thyself.

Cure thyself, O ye of little faith.

You will be no help to anyone if you allow yourself to suffer from these inner thorns.

These things I have spoken unto you, that in me you might have peace. In the world you shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world. — John 16:33

WARNING: graphic, lewd content. In this video, German Chancellor Angela Merkel dances in Greece in the 1990s. This reinforces my point that female immodesty is a symptom and cause of social collapse. Read More »

Watercolor by unknown artist

A CHORAL rendering of the Northern Lights by Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, performed here by the University Singers at the University of Minnesota, captures the pulsing drama and beauty of these magnificent atmospheric events.

Pulchra es, amica mea,
suavis et decora filia Ierusalem.
Pulchra es, amica mea,
suavis et decora sicut Ierusalem,
terribilis ut castrorum acies ordinata.
Averte oculos tuos a me
quia ipsi me avolare fecerunt.

Thou art beautiful, O my love,
sweet and comely as Jerusalem,
terrible as an army set in array.
Turn away thy eyes from me,
for they have made me flee away.

The composer wrote:

Looking out from an attic window one Christmas close to Oslo, over a wintry lake under the stars, I was thinking about how this ‘terrible’ beauty is so profoundly reflected in the northern lights, or aurora borealis, which, having grown up in the southern part of the country, I have only seen once or twice in my life. It is one of the most beautiful natural phenomena I’ve ever witnessed, and has such a powerful, electric quality that must have been both mesmerizing and terrifying to people in the past, when no one knew what it was and when much superstition was attached to these experiences.

From “Mass Pop Culture and the Destruction of the Sacred”

by Lawrence Auster

An example of the process of desacralization (if I may use that word in connection with secular values) by which popular culture flattens every higher value is the use of the American flag as a clothing accessory. Up to the early 1960s, a period that already antedates the personal memory of most people alive today, the American flag was always treated with respect. There were strict rules on how to handle the flag, on the proper times for raising and lowering the flag, and so on, which were universally followed. Such respect was a sign of a deeply felt, yet moderate patriotism. The rules governing the use of flag placed a small but significant restraint on self. People weren’t free to handle the flag any way they liked–it represented a value higher than themselves.

When hippies and anti-war protesters began wearing the U.S. flag design on the seat of their blue jeans, it was understood by all Americans, and resented by most, as a flagrant sign of disrespect, but as the counterculture became mainstreamed in the Seventies and Eighties, so did appropriation of the U.S. flag as a personal emblem. Many police departments began wearing a flag decal on their uniforms, not understanding that they were cheapening the symbol they thought they were honoring. The flag was also exploited commercially, as in the display of huge American flags, visible for miles, in front of highway automobile dealerships. While patriotic in a “fun” kind of way, these gigantic flags were also turning the symbol of country into a tool of self-promotion.

The perversion of the U.S. flag reached its height at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, a vast media-scripted celebration of racial diversity, consumerism, and the liberated self. At this pop-culture extravaganza, the U.S. team in several events were dressed — literally — in the flag, their entire outfits designed in fanciful stars and stripes designs. The uniform of the U.S. wrestler’s team consisted of a skin-tight “super-hero” outfit covered by a jazzy U.S. flag pattern. The flag, once a symbol of patriotism and restraint of self, now symbolized comic-book self-assertion.

The use of the stars and stripes as a flashy costume design should have been extremely offensive to thoughtful Americans as well as to the Olympic teams from other countries, none of whom had the hubris and bad taste to advertise their national symbols on their persons. But not a complaint was heard about it, a sign that the American counterculture has become the dominant world culture. The counterculture has been so perfectly mainstreamed that people don’t realize anymore that it is a counterculture. If anyone questions the degradation of the U.S. flag, it is he who seems strange, rather than the people who have turned the flag into a wrestling costume. It’s not that contemporary Americans intend disrespect for a revered symbol, as the hippies of the 60’s did. It is that they have no concept of respect for anything. The typical member of the post-Sixties pop culture, whose soul has been formed by rock music, sexual liberation, and the irony of TV comedians, cannot conceive of anything higher than the liberated individual self–unless it be the massing of millions of such selves into orchestrated global celebrations such as the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Thus post-Sixties American culture undermines love of nation, not by attacking the nation outright (as the Sixties left did), but by appropriating the nation’s symbol for purposes of “fun.” In the same way, the post-Sixties American culture undercuts the honor and respect due to mothers and fathers, not by attacking parenthood outright (as the Sixties left did), but by virtually eliminating from our language the words “mother” and “father,” through which such respect is expressed, and replacing them with their informal, “fun” equivalents, “mom” and “dad.” Against this mainstream culture of subversion conservatives are helpless. Indeed, they barely notice the culture of subversion, since they are members of it.

Rachael Alpin says honour crimes are often committed by women

“HONOUR” crimes against Muslim and Hindu women — such as forced marriages, confinement, beatings and murders of adulterers —  are often aided and incited by women, a British police detective and researcher says.

Feminists often cite honour (“honor” in American English) killings and abuse as proof of innate misogyny. But the detective’s findings complicate this view.

The BBC reports:

“Honour” abuse is usually associated with women from Muslim, Sikh or Hindu backgrounds and happens when they are seen to have “shamed” their community. It can also affect men, with some charities saying male abuse is underreported.

In Mrs [Rachael] Aplin’s research, the abuse perpetrated by mothers included hitting, kicking and slapping, assault with household objects, cutting off daughters’ hair and deception in order to encourage a fleeing victim back home.

Other behaviours included threatening to kill the victim or throw them downstairs, bartering to sell them, false imprisonment, emotional blackmail, confiscation of passports, bank cards and mobile phones and emotional blackmail.

Mrs Alpin said: “The instinctive reaction from the public and from police officers and social workers is that mothers protect and nurture and love their children. But actually we need to rethink that.

“Mothers are the key perpetrators in abuse against daughters, and this is mostly abuse pre-marriage. So it’s not necessarily abuse against wives once they’ve been forced into marriage.”

FEMINISTS claim that women are more fulfilled and happy when they are free to wear almost nothing.

Virtually the whole world has accepted their premises. Go to any beach, and you will be hard-pressed to find any woman covered up to the extent that these women — such ridiculous figures, huh? — were in 1906.

Are women better off? Are they better off now that the battle over the bikini has long passed and no one will think twice if you show up in a few threads?

Obviously, some say they are better off. But this is a lie — not a conscious lie necessarily, but a definite falsehood. Women are much worse off. They are less powerful. They are less happy. They are less fulfilled. (And they are less numerous. One of the ironies of “sexual freedom” is that procreative activity and oceans of lust produce fewer people. What philosophy can possibly be pro-woman when it is against their very existence, embattled against those not yet born?)

Who shall find a valiant woman? Far and
from the uttermost coasts
is the price of her .. She hath made
for herself clothing of tapestry:
fine linen, and purple is her covering …
Strength and beauty are her clothing, and
she shall laugh in the latter day …

Proverbs 31:10

These “ridiculous” figures on the beach were headed for a happier existence — both in this world and the next — than those in bikinis and thongs today. For one, they were much more likely to achieve what most women most want: the love of a man and a happy home, the foundation of which is the mysterious and ineradicable differences between the sexes. They were much less likely to face the tremendous existential crises women face today, which are placed under the heading of “depression” or other psychological diagnoses which do not begin to describe the depth of internal conflict feminism begets.

One of the common symptoms of insanity or dementia in an individual is a loss of modesty. The insane person does not care if he is covered up. We live in an insane society.

Immodesty undermines femininity. A woman’s greatest influence and dignity are not based in her body but in her personality and soul. When flesh is exposed, that’s what people see. The flesh, not the person. (Immodest dress is especially unkind to the woman who does not have an ideal body.)

Immodesty is a form of aggression.

This is because men are — by nature — highly sensitive to visual stimuli, much more than women, and cannot, except by emasculating themselves at some deep level, eradicate their responses to the female form. (And why would women want them to?) Most women are not conscious of this reality in an age where they are directed by powerful forces to dress in a certain way and to believe that the sexes are exactly the same (while at the same time hypocritically dressing as if they are not), but immodesty in women is a power trip over men in the same way physical aggression by men can be a power trip over women.

The male bully often dominates with his fist. The female bully dominates with her sexual power. That power is visual.

Immodesty in women induces men to sin — in their thoughts or actions (unless they have been thoroughly emasculated). All sin is a form of slavery, and thus when immodesty is not aggression, it is at the very least thoughtlessness and inconsideration. It is selfish and unloving to men (I realize that many men would prefer that kind of selfishness), and to those women who do not possess the same sexual power either because of age or lesser beauty. Women (and it was women primarily who enforced standards of modesty) once acted as a sort of trade union — to protect the higher interests of all women. Now they regularly display this inconsideration toward each other.

For much of history, in many cultures, the world was wiser than it is today and would be scandalized by the scene on an American beach or at a swim club today.

The Greeks and Romans had separate bathing houses for swimming for men and women. Can one accuse those of such advanced civilizations as these of barbaric attitudes? [See correction below.] Colleen Hammond writes in her book Dressing with Dignity:

Separate bathing houses for men and women continued in one form or another through the centuries. By the 1400’s, mixed swimming occurred in some establishments, and these places were known for their promiscuity. Mixed bathing houses were considered hotbeds of vice, as only women with loose morals would swim in mixed company. Actually, the word “stew” originally meant bath house but came to be another name for a brothel.

Over the centuries, respectable bath houses continued to be separate. Before the mid-18th century, mixed swimming was condemned by Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims as an occasion for vice. From the latter half of the 1800’s, women who went bathing — usually outdoors — wore an elaborate bathing outfit which included sleeves, a skirt, and loose pantaloons to below the knee. The fabric used was basically the same heavy fabric used in other clothing — so today we would hardly consider such an outfit a “real” bathing suit. [Dressing with Dignity, Tan Books, p. 45)

Interestingly, the bathing suit for women changed — and coed swimming became popular — just around the time when women were being used for more menial roles in the workplace, in factories and offices.

The bikini, named after the island where the atomic bomb was tested, was introduced in 1946, when many women were tired from their work in wartime factories and offices. The more sexually “free” women became, the more they were economically exploited, as if Satan said, “Here, I will give you this apple — this power unleashed. And in return you will have drudgery for the rest of your days.”

The Victorian swimming outfits such as those above (I’m not saying they are the only way to go or the best way) might seem relatively uncomfortable, but one of the paradoxes of semi-nudity is that it really isn’t all that comfortable. In fact, it can be uncomfortable. A woman has to keep whatever little she is wearing from falling off or exposing the tiny zones that do, even today, cause embarrassment.

She is often conscious of what she is exposing. She is less free when bound in this prison of flesh. The spirit roams farther than the body.

Don’t take for granted what you see on a beach today. It will not last.

Civilization demands clothes. Slavery demands nudity. Read More »

The lime tree (Yarra River from Kensington Road, South Yarra) by Frederick McCubbin (1917)

TREES are among the greatest works of art. They are so clearly designed for human enjoyment. This guitar piece, “The Old Lime Tree,” by the Russian composer Sergei Rudnev, played here by Stefan Schmitz, translates the serene shade of an old tree into sound.
 
 

“As of a few months ago, our country has spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, wasted. And the lives, the lives, thousands and thousands and thousands of lives. $6 trillion and thousands of young, beautiful lives.

“We started 16 years ago and it’s in far worse shape than it was 16 years ago by many times over. So, we spent all of this money, all of these lives.

“And let me tell you, I came in and took over a very, very difficult hand. But we’re going to get it fixed. That’s what you put me here for. We’re going to get it fixed.”

– President Donald Trump, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, June 21, 2017

CHRISTOPHER BOLLYN writes at his site:

What is most significant about Trump’s common-sense comment on the money and lives wasted on the post-9/11 wars in the Middle East is that the media completely ignored this comment. The same media that spins articles from every Trump tweet concerning Russian “interference” in the election ignored this important comment made by the commander-in-chief about the wars in the Middle East and delivered in a speech on June 21. This fact says a great deal about who is deceiving the people about the War on Terror – and who is not. The controlled media has, after all, consistently supported the deception of 9/11 and the fraudulent War on Terror.