FROM an essay by Laird Wilcox, “The Practice of Ritual Defamation: How values, opinions and beliefs are controlled in democratic societies:”

Defamation is the destruction or attempted destruction of the reputation, status, character or standing in the community of a person or group of persons by unfair, wrongful, or malicious speech or publication. For the purposes of this essay, the central element is defamation in retaliation for the real or imagined attitudes, opinions or beliefs of the victim, with the intention of silencing or neutralizing his or her influence, and/or making an example of them so as to discourage similar independence and “insensitivity” or non-observance of taboos. It is different in nature and degree from simple criticism or disagreement in that it is aggressive, organized and skillfully applied, often by an organization or representative of a special interest group, and in that it consists of several characteristic elements.

    Ritual Defamation is not ritualistic because it follows any prescribed religious or mystical doctrine, nor is it embraced in any particular document or scripture. Rather, it is ritualistic because it follows a predictable, stereotyped pattern which embraces a number of elements, as in a ritual. Read More »

STAFF Sgt. Alexandria Mae Morrow was the mother of two young children, ages two and four.

“Equality” and the fraudulent “War on Terror” create two more orphans. Read More »

JOHN TIFFANY writes at The American Free Press:

Since Jan. 1, over 100 bomb threats have been made against Jewish institutions, such as schools and community centers, around the world, including in the United States, New Zealand, and Australia. The establishment immediately insinuated that “hateful Trump supporters” were terrorizing the Jewish community. Now it turns out a 19-year-old Jewish man living in Israel, who holds dual citizenship in America and the Middle Eastern state, stands accused of making most of the threats.

In related news, a Jewish man in upstate New York was arrested this week for spray-painting swastikas on his home in another fake anti-Semitic crime.

When the Jewish suffering racket is in jeopardy, Jews — a tiny, tiny minority of Jews never publicly excoriated by the majority — stage anti-Semitic acts that gentile Americans almost never commit. Expect much more of this.

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

Recently a rumor spread in Germany that the food from McDonald’s contains wood products. (McDonald’s fries are extremely popular in Germany.)

To refute this, MacDonald’s produced this video.

The deadpan seriousness of the actor is priceless. The script in English: Read More »

MORE here. Fifty years of non-stop demonization of white men and outsourcing of labor don’t exactly boost morale.

Natassia writes:

I thought you might get a kick out of this. It’s a screenshot from The Morning Times (Washington, D.C.), Dec. 29th, 1895, page 11. The entire newspaper is free to read on the Library of Congress website.

I came across it while researching for my genealogy hobby. Read More »

G.R. writes:

This essay by Fabrice Hadjadj in Humanum reminded me of you. It’s titled “Rediscovering the “Language of Wood”: Why Can’t We Just Substitute ‘Be Fruitful and Multiply’ with ‘Connect and Download?’”

Here is an excerpt:

Some might think that there is no difference between the library of Trinity College and a database. One might argue that the database is more useful, because it can be carried in a pocket on a USB stick or on an external hard drive. But can you live in an external hard drive? With the library, there is the large park outside, the useless vastness of the halls and of the large windows, the humble solemnity of the slabs of rock which hold the memory of the forests, the hammered leather of the bindings which preserve the memory of the animals, and the physical closeness of the teacher, the physical closeness of that fellow-student or of that pretty co-ed we don’t know; and then the pen, the ink, the heavy paper which forces us not to waste and on which we cannot write just anything: all things which don’t serve us in our work, which don’t provide information for our topic of research, but which sustain us in our presence to the world, and which remind us of the generous density of existence.

S.K. writes:

Recently you had a commenter post regarding teacher-student affairs.

I have followed these stories before, overwhelmingly female teachers and always they are the initiators of it. The male-female gym teacher with the girls seems far rarer. Last year one female teacher had become pregnant by a student half her age, and she was married (she was going to pass off the child as her husband’s). And these are generally young and beautiful women by and large, and often married. This phenomenon will one day need to be explained somehow, in the meantime all we can do is look on and wonder why. Read More »

IN response to New York Times columnist David Brooks’ assertion that only envy or mental illness could motivate criticism of the Jewish cultural and political agenda (otherwise known as “anti-Semitism”), the editorial staff of The Anti-New York Times displays what must be derangement and envy:

That’s it David! Like our neurotic counterparts in the Middle East and Europe, we Americans who are concerned about the negative impact of Jewish Marxism and Zionism are also mentally unhinged — just envious losers who suffer from an “inferiority complex.” Never mind the fact that sex-crazed Jewish Hollywood is corrupting our children, or that the Jewish Central Bank is debasing our currency, or that the Jewish Lobby wants us to shed blood for Israel, or that the Jewish-run media is propagandizing the public with fake news, or that Jewish academia persecutes scholars who dare to question the conventional accounts of World War II and the Holocaust TM. No. Our sentiments are all about “inferiority complex.”

It takes chutzpah to believe that the only reason people would criticize you is that you are better than them.

Gustav Dore, Belling the Cat; 1868

S., a longtime reader from India, writes:

No doubt everyone is by now well informed about the on-going H1B visa issue. CBS 60 minutes recently aired a special featuring the Americans who lost their jobs to Indians. On this ground, I have no ethical or moral dilemma whatsoever. Indeed, I know of many such Indians, with questionable English and technology skills, who are displacing Americans using the H1B program. That is not right, but this is not what this email is about.

The majority of H1B visa hirees tend to be Indians, but no news report tells you how many of them are Indians who have used an American education to get here, who are in fact qualified and paid on par. Here’s a look at what a Columbia University Computer Science Engineering Class looks like: Read More »

From the archives of Most Holy Trinity Church, St. Louis

JAMES H. writes:

Alan’s missive on his visit to an old Catholic cemetery in St. Louis reminded me of my own visit to a St. Louis graveyard.

A few weeks ago, my sister and I visited Holy Trinity Church in North St. Louis, St. Nicholas Church in South St. Louis and Calvary Cemetery. My paternal great-great-great uncle was from a small town near Paderborn, Germany and was Rector at Holy Trinity when he died in 1907. Paderborn, Germany is the same town my maternal great-great-grandmother was from as well and only 20 miles from Rheder, Germany where her husband was born. Small world!

My uncle is buried in Calvary Cemetery in North St. Louis – truly one of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve ever visited.

On our visit, I could not help being struck by the many beautiful churches in North and South St. Louis, each and every one a testament to the faith-filled men and women who built these communities. Now these same “communities” have been largely destroyed. Read More »

A LIBERAL woman describes her experience with a man in the women’s room at Disneyland.

FROM Lifesite News:

Joseph Sciambra, who participated in the “gay” subculture in his youth as a porn actor and later abandoned the lifestyle after returning to the Catholic faith, has been working for years to bring about a reform of such [“gay-friendly”] parishes and programs, and to alert the public about the harm being done to Catholics who suffer from “same-sex attraction.” However, the bishops and diocesan administrations consistently ignore him and others who complain.

“For the most part, my attempts at instigating a dialogue or discourse with certain bishops in terms of sharing my experiences about gay-affirmative parishes and ministries has failed,” Sciambra told LifeSiteNews. “In some cases, it has taken years to elicit a single response. Then they have recommended patience.”

Patience, however, is difficult for Sciambra, who watched dozens of friends die as a result of their homosexual lifestyle.

“As someone who lost friends to AIDS, partially because they were willfully deceived by priests who recommended that they remain in the ‘gay’ lifestyle, watching as these parishes and ministries continue to confuse and mislead others, sometimes for over 30 years, it’s difficult to remain patiently silent,” Sciambra told LifeSiteNews. “I tend to look at it this way: When a doctor is treating someone suffering from a leg infected by gangrene, does the doctor advise patience, or does he act swiftly and decisively in order to save the person?  Because time is of the essence.”

SOME free polemic from The Anti-New York Times:

[I]f Twitterer-In-Chief’s juvenile cyber-blurbs are any indication, the road ahead may be very rocky.  “North Korea is behaving very badly,”he tweeted. Then added, “They have been ‘playing’ the United States for years. China has done little to help!”

And who the frickety-frack is Orange Man [Trump] — that self-professed champion of “national sovereignty” — to lecture North Korea and China on what are purely their own domestic affairs? Why should North Korea disarm itself? How did that work out for Qaddafi of Libya? How does this aggressive posture serve the interests of the “America First” ideal that OM campaigned on and got elected with? And if these threats against Iran, North Korea, and, though subtly, China do not serve the American people, then who does benefit?

THIS presentation by Mike Maloney helps explain why families are not able to survive on one income anymore. Even those who have no personal debt are paying for massive, systematized indebtedness through inflation and taxes. Feminism, by making two-income families glamorous, puts a romantic gloss on debt bondage and a greater disparity in wealth.

Debt bondage relies on monetary illiteracy.

In the 1920s, the Social Credit movement emerged to address this problem. Social Credit missionaries, based in Quebec, went from door to door trying to educate people about the monetary system. Some still do as the St. Michael’s Pilgrims. One of social credit’s proponents Louis Even, author of In This Age of Plenty, wrote this description of the movements goals: Read More »

Crucifixion of St. Peter, Caravaggio; 1601

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

I have just re-read, as I do each year, one of the greatest novels of the last century and perhaps one that speaks more powerfully than any other to traditional Catholics about what really lays at the heart of our faith and what we have a right to expect from our shepherds. I speak of Graham Greene’s masterpiece: The Power and the Glory (1939).

The novel is a very rich one, interweaving many important themes relevant to both religious faith and the human condition which would require a book-length essay to do justice to it. Very broadly it is the story of the alcoholic “whisky priest” hunted for a number of years by the fiercely-anti Catholic government of a Mexican state that has confiscated Church property, outlawed the Mass and declared all priests to be, prima facie, traitors subject to execution upon capture. Read More »

ALAN writes:

One day more than ten years ago I was walking through an old Catholic cemetery in St. Louis.  I was in a frame of mind to do that because I knew that that cemetery is the final resting place for twenty-five people in my family and extended family.  I was taken there when my grandmother died in 1957, but I have no concrete memories from that day.

At its entrance is a two-story chapel mausoleum.  I walked into the building and read some of the names on the wall.  In one corner there was a name just above eye level.  It read “Stephanie Crane” and there was a small photograph of an attractive young woman with dark hair.  But what caught my attention were the years of her life: 1949-2002.  It struck me instantly:  She and I were contemporaries.  We were the same age.  She had been five weeks younger.  Yet there was her name in plain sight on that wall—and here was I, still walking around.  She died at age 52.  That moment had the effect of “concentrating the mind,” although my mind had already been concentrated by the loss of my parents in successive years.  What it meant to me was:  It is later than you think. Read More »

JAMES N. writes:

Another teacher-student sex story, of the sort that is depressingly familiar – although the running away is still rather uncommon. But what caught my attention was the quote far down in the article from “a family source:”  “It’s so hard to understand what would bring someone to do these kinds of things. I don’t understand how this is real life,” the source says.

But, of course, it’s EASY to understand what would bring someone (a man) to seek relations with a comely young woman, if society, and this family, knew anything about male sexuality, and someone who “doesn’t understand how this is real life” knows nothing about real life.

People who DID know about real life made sure that relations between the sexes were subject to stringent legal regulation, and strong social sanctions. Read More »