IT IS ALWAYS extremely sad when someone commits suicide. So it is with the death this week of the wildly successful New York fashion designer, Kate Spade, 55, whose upbeat, chic, and colorful feminine accessories were understandably very popular.

Spade, who hung herself with a scarf and leaves behind a husband and a 13-year-old daughter, obviously had a dark side she did not wish to reveal to the public. This darkness is apparent to me in the artwork which decorated the multi-million dollar homes in New York and the Hamptons owned by her and her husband, Andy Spade. These homes combine a studied, preppy look of classic furniture, elegant patterned fabrics and cozy knick knacks with chillingly bleak modern art. This contrast is a common form of juxtaposition among the fashionable. On one hand, there is a devotion to tradition and on the other there are “I-reject-all-that” gestures. The art people hang in their homes expresses their worldview and definitely affects their inner states. Even people with vast resources to buy the most expensive of things often cannot make a full commitment to beauty because they are alienated from its source. This alienation, I submit, was the cause of Spade’s death. How could Kate possibly make sense of intense inner suffering in such a world?

I offer these images, however, mostly without comment and with condolences to her family. I do not mean to suggest that all modern art is dangerous. Much of it, however, makes people unhappy because it is ugly and bleak or simply confirms an emptiness within. Much of it is mere sensation and thus enforces a profound meaninglessness.

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AMERICANS support the Israeli military to the tune of $10 million a day, money that could potentially go to providing health care, college tuition, housing and jobs to the poor in this country and elsewhere.

The Israeli army has killed and injured thousands of unarmed Arabs, including medics and journalists, in recent weeks. (A total of 112 have been killed and more than 13,000 have been injured, some shot in the head and limbs.) But the army also routinely performs “extra-judicial” assassinations of Palestinians who are considered a threat.

Yesterday, Ezzeddin Abdul-Hafith Tamimi, 21, was shot by soldiers elsewhere from the protests by Gazans. Here is his story, posted at the If Americans Knew blog. Please bear in mind when reading this that Tamimi was 21 years old, that he was not attacking anyone when he was shot down and that he never got his day in court. Please bear in mind also that you and I are indirectly complicit in these actions because of American support:

Ezzeddin Abdul-Hafith Tamimi, 21, was shot by Israeli soldiers in Nabi Saleh village with three live rounds from very close range in an extrajudicial assassination. The soldiers then prevented Palestinian medics from approaching Ezzeddin as he lay, critically injured, on the ground.

According to eyewitnesses, Palestinian medics tried to provide aid to the seriously wounded man, but the soldiers assaulted them, and threatened to shoot them. Ezzeddin then succumbed to his injuries.

When Ezzeddin’s mother was informed that he was killed, she rushed to see him, but the soldiers sprayed her face with pepper-spray and forced her away. (more…)

  The anniversary of the Devil's Day suicide mission - and the Marxist E.U. which it spawned, are nothing for Americans or Europeans to celebrate. After 73 years of moral and cultural rot, unlimited Third World immigration, [also non-stop wars of foreign aggression that are not in the interest of Americans or Europeans, have decimated other peoples and have helped create waves of refugees] and now, a steadily eroding economy, the ever diminishing number of British & American D-Day survivors have got to be asking themselves, "What was it all for?" To quote the British Historian David Irving: "If the British soldiers on the beaches of Normandy in 1944 could look forward to the end of the century and see what England has become, they would not have bothered to advance another 40 yards up the beach." -- The Anti-New York Times

AS MORE women see through the lies of feminism and embrace the traditional life, the Big Media are likely to shame and demonize the housewife more and more. Annie Kelly, a Ph.D. student who is writing her dissertation on internet anti-feminism, sets a very, very high standard in this regard with her recent article at The New York Times. No longer is the housewife just a loser and a parasite, she is now a “sinister,” “authoritarian,” “hyper-feminine,” “racist,” “abhorrent,” ‘red-lipsticked,” “lunatic” “white supremacist” so afraid of being violated and objectified by men that she opts for submission. She’s also the usual parasite (Ph.D. students writing political tracts are not parasites): (more…)

WILLIAM J. TYCHONIEVICH writes:

I enjoyed your takedown of the inane song “Imagine,” but as an English teacher I must insist that the proper annotation for “And no religion too” is “And no grammar, either.” (more…)

ALAN writes:

“What did I have that I don’t have?  What have I got a great big lack of….?”

Eydie Gorme asked those questions in her classic 1966 recording of What Did I Have that I Don’t Have? Keep them in mind as you read the following.

Did you hear about the 12-year-old boy who rode his bicycle from his home in Utah to his grandparents’ home in Massachusetts…..alone?

His parents gave him permission to do so, provided that he phone them every night so that they could keep track of his whereabouts and safety.  He did, and they did.  There were no problems.  He arrived safe and sound.  He was not harmed, robbed, molested, kidnapped, or killed.

Oh, and I forgot to mention one thing:  He did that in the early 1960s. (more…)

JUDE DUFFY wrote at Fitzpatrick Informer last week about the Irish abortion referendum. His thesis that the referendum was rigged is plausible, but even if one does not accept it, his analysis of the major forces at work in Ireland is accurate: In keeping with the Big Rig strategy—a subspecies of the Big Lie—the Deep State rigged the abortion vote referendum on a massive scale; the theory being that, as with the Big Lie, the bigger the rig, the more it stupefies the target into dazed submission—Shock and Awe administered in the psycho-political realm. Bear in mind that the Irish vote had implications not just for Ireland but also for Northern Ireland, the United States, Poland, Spain, Hungary, and other countries where abortion is still a burning issue. So, for both domestic and international reasons, the Deep State needed the defeat to be huge and psychologically crushing. Is anyone naive enough to believe they wouldn’t rig it under such exigent conditions? Seriously? In Ireland, remember, there are no alternative media, and almost no independent journalists of any kind. No one here is watching the Rothschild crooks of the government and the Alinskyite far Left, so they can get away with just about anything. Crucially, Ireland also has proportionally one of the largest and most powerful Masonic networks in the world—networks that almost no one—not even the strongest Catholics—seem to be aware of. Indeed, the silence in Ireland surrounding Freemasonry is a not so paradoxical…

BISHOP DONALD SANBORN, at his blog In Veritate, answers a college student’s questions about faith and the meaning of existence. An excerpt:

Question 2. What are your views on evolution? Evolution is a proven fact. How do you reconcile it with Christianity?

Answer. Evolution is an absurd system which is based on an absurd principle: that something comes from nothing, that the greater comes from the lesser, that the more perfect comes from the less perfect, that order and constancy come from chance. Evolution is a modern mythology which makes the systems of the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses look rational. It is to say that there is design without a designer. It is a creed that is too unbelievable to recite. Indeed, I think that one would have to be psychotic to really believe that it is true. It would be psychotic, for example, to say that the music of Mozart was composed by his cat’s walking on a piano. Yet evolution asserts this very principle. (more…)

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

As a member of TTH’s crack team of foreign correspondents sprinkled strategically throughout the world, I thought I would report to you on what is currently playing out down under with the Catholic churchman whom the world’s press are fond, (I think probably rightly), of describing as “the third-highest ranking official in the Curia” and as “the Pope’s finance minister,” Cardinal George Pell, a native son of these parts.

You wrote a very prescient piece about his legal woes back on 20 July 2017.

[NOTE: This website does not recognize the heretical, modernist Vatican II Church as the Catholic Church. But in the eyes of the world (and many sincere Catholics), it is the Catholic Church, and thus allegations of crimes by its clergy are publicly imputed to the Catholic Church. The media coverage of sex abuse charges, when that coverage is slanted or false, and the prosecution of false allegations, constitute a war against the Catholic Church.]

His Eminence, apart from his Vatican post, is Archbishop of Sydney, Australia’s largest city, and was before that Archbishop of its second city, Melbourne. He has been for several decades now far and away the most widely-recognized Catholic in this country. Although you and I and just about all other readers of TTH would beg to differ, he has long been identified by the press as a leading “conservative” voice in the church world-wide.

His Eminence has been on extended leave of absence from his Vatican post since June 2017 when he  was charged that month with a series of “historic” child sexual abuse crimes dating back to the 70’s and ‘90’s.

In your piece in 2017 you expressed serious doubts as to the credibilty of two of the main witneses against Pell, (the identities of most other witnesses, along with their detailed evidence, being withheld from the public by court order as is usual here in such cases).

You were right to do so. His Eminence’s Committal Hearing completed last month. The magistrate delivered her findings and judgement earlier this month. I’m not American but from what I have read of US practice and procedure our Committal procedure seems to resemble fairly closely the US “Grand Jury” procedure. That is: before someone may be tried for an indictable offense a magistrate, sitting alone, hears evidence in a modified type of trial in order to determine whether there exists a  reasonable possibility that a jury, properly instructed, might find the allegations proven. It is not  the criminal standard of proof of “beyond reasonable doubt” that is the test applied in committals but simply whether there appears to exist a credible or reasonable case for the accused to answer. (more…)

JOHN LENNON’S 1971 song “Imagine” is the New World Order anthem, a song not of peace, but of deadening global tyranny and nihilism. Funny how many people have been seduced by the powerful, hopeful music into thinking it is benign. The music acts as a potent sedative — although few pills or pharmaceuticals could so instantly lull the rational mind as this can. It’s no accident that this utopian, Communistic song, which envisions a world without personality, possessions, nations and religion, has been played at the United Nations and the Summer Olympics. There’s a circle in hell where speakers play this tune over and over, driving everyone into raving lunacy. In hell, there is no imagination.

I have annotated the lyrics:

Imagine there’s no heaven
Imagine you are nothing
It’s easy if you try
It’s easier if you don’t
No hell below us
And no justice too
Above us only sky
Around us only force
Imagine all the people living for today
No past or future, ah-ha-ah-a (more…)

ERIC writes: This photo was taken on a ferry with a lot of adult commuters, and not too many kids. But still.

Israeli forces have killed 112 Palestinians and injured 13,190 since March 30th, including a deaf child who was shot in the head, medics, and journalists. One Israeli soldier was reportedly injured. Read more here.

HEAD to a fall-out shelter when he speaks. Novus Ordo Watch examines "Pope" Francis's latest outrage: We must be clear that merely experiencing same-sex attraction is not sinful — sin is an act of the will, not a feeling. What is sinful is consenting to it, approving of it, acting on it, and claiming that such attraction is normal, legitimate, or healthy. It’s sinful because sexual attraction exists for sexual acts, and the primary purpose of sexuality is procreation, something that is intrinsically frustrated in unnatural acts. Unnatural acts are, in the truest sense of the word, a perversion, meaning a turning away from the proper end (the Latin pervertere literally means “to turn to ill effect”). They are an abuse of the faculties God gave to man so he could produce offspring. As one moral theologian puts it: “The malice of sodomy consists in the perverted affection towards the wrong sex or in the attraction towards the wrong method of sexual gratification” (Rev. Heribert Jone, Moral Theology [Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1962], n. 230.2; italic and bold print given).

MARY BALL MARTINEZ’S fascinating book, The Undermining of the Catholic Church, first published in 1991, describes the internal destruction that began well before Vatican II and then burst into the open with the Council, causing even leading non-Catholic intellectuals and artists — figures such as Robert Graves, Vladimir Askanazy and Iris Murdoch — to object.

Martinez was a Vatican news reporter for many years. An excerpt from the 2007 edition by the Christian Book Club of America:

In Rome the hours before dawn are never really warm, even in summer. It was the vigil of Pentecost and virtually summer (the great movable feasts came late in the year 1971) when some four thousand men and women from many parts of the world knelt through the night on chill flagstones below the steps of St. Peter’s Basilica. In the immense circle of the piazza, only dimly lit by an uncertain moon and a few electric bulbs hidden high among the all-embracing Bernini columns, they would have looked from above, even in such numbers, like small huddled shadows.

Ahead, as if it were the object of their prayers, the great facade, secure atop its thirty-eight steps, immutable now for four hundred years, its magnificent stones successors to lesser stones, said to cover the bones of the Galilean fisherman, Simon called Peter. Here was the core of Christendom, the Rock and the tangible sign of Christian permanence. For the kneeling pilgrims the darkness itself added dimension and wonder to the wall the Basilica made, a wall to hold back not just the dawn that would soon come out of the East, but a wall to hold back all the false doctrines on earth. Hardly a handful among the crowd would have known that already behind the brave facade a hollowing-out process, an eating away of strength and substance, had been going on for more than half a century, that the Catholic Church had been undermined. [10]

All of them knew that something was wrong; otherwise they would not have joined the pilgrimage. In France, in Germany, England, Argentina, the United States, Australia, each in his own parish, had been stricken by sudden change, by orders to worship in a strange new way. Nearly half of the pilgrims were French, having arrived on chartered trains from Paris and all had come to plead with the Holy Father to give them back the Mass, the Sacraments and a Catechism for their children.

Had any of them looked beyond the pillars and high over to the right, they could have made out the shuttered windows of the papal apartments. Was the Pope asleep? Could he sleep, knowing they were there? From where he lay, the murmured Aves and Paters of the fifteen decades of the rosary cannot have sounded much louder than the play of water on the ancient fountain in the piazza. (more…)

  FROM Mike King's Anti-New York Times: Who bloody cares about those degenerate useless eaters of the modern British Monarchy and their "royal weddings?" Evidently, the owners of the Piranha Press (cough cough) and the hordes of simpletons enthralled by their wholly owned EIB (Electronic Idiot Box) do -- and there's a historical reason for it. You see, the British Royal Mafia and various parliamentarians -- initially for the glory of the ever-expanding Empire and then for the purpose of survival -- got in bed with and were then forced to stay in bed with the International Jewish bankers a long time ago. That is why "The House of Windsor" is still around, whereas the Habsburgs (Spain,Austria),  Hohenzollern  (Prussia/Germany)  Romanovs  (Russia)  and Bourbons(France, Italy) are not. [...] What the short-sighted British Monarchy and ultra-nationalist statesmen never realized, is that in allowing the money lenders to grow so rich by financing the worldwide empire and its associated wars, the British eventually went broke, lost their official "hit man" position to the United States, lost their empire and power to the banker-funded subversive Marxists and Fabians, and even lost control of their home island to the Globalists as well! But for centuries of faithful services rendered to Zion, the British royals did at least get to keep their lives, their inherited fortunes, their unwarranted privileges and their undeserved "rock star" status -- provided, of course, that they continue to obey and not get any ideas about truly serving the interests of the…

  THE BLESSED VIRGIN ON PENTECOST MORNING Maid and Mother, pure and kind, ’Tis the Whitsun morning; May hath wearied sun and wind For the world’s adorning,— Earth is blossomed like a bride For the blessed Whitsuntide. Thrice the mighty Spirit wrought For thy soul’s completing: First, thy stainless self He brought To the world’s entreating; Next, to work thy “Fiat” came; Last, He crowns thy brow with flame. ’Tis Elijah’s olden rite, Slow in sign preparing: First, God built thee, altar bright,— Christ, the Victim, bearing; Last, from Heaven, at thy desire Flashed the Lord’s consuming fire. ---- Edward F. Garesche, S.J

A READER writes:

Your reader, Kyle, mentioned the legal battle between Katy Perry and a few nuns in Los Angeles. I think he is idealizing these nuns. I’ve done a tiny bit of searching into this story and came across the nuns’ website Stand with the Sisters and a link to a documentary on the story (which I’ve not spent my time watching).

The documentary opens with these words:

“Would you be surprised to find out that this is actually a case about women’s rights? For millenia religious women have persevered silently under the patriarchy of the Catholic Church. Their status has always remained secondary, behind the male clergy. Courageously, two women have taken a stand against this injustice.” (more…)

THIS IS A PUBLIC letter to David Leonhardt, columnist for The New York Times:

Dear Mr. Leonhardt,

I am writing in response to your fascinating opinion piece, “I’m not Quoting Enough Women.”

I understand that you are interested in quoting more women in your articles. Too many male experts, you believe, are asked for their input and you have decided to discriminate on the basis of sex alone to include a greater number of women in your reports. (more…)