Legend of St Francis: 2. St Francis Giving his Mantle to a Poor Man 1297-99; Giotto

FROM an entry at Christ or Chaos on St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is today:

He preferred to hear himself reviled rather than praised, and when people extolled the merits of his sanctity, he ordered one of the friars to assail his ears with abusive epithets. The friar, all unwilling, called him a bumpkin, a money-lover, an ignoramus, and a worthless fellow, and Francis cheered and said: “Lord, bless you, brother! You have told the truth, and I need to hear such things!” The servant of God wished not so much to be in command as to be subject to authority, not so much to give orders as to carry them out. Therefore he gave up the office of general of his Order, and asked for a guardian, to whose will he would be subject in everything. To the friar with whom he was accustomed to go about he always promised obedience and always kept his promise. (Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine, O.P., The Golden Legend.)

IS PURITANISM, and the Protestant spirit in general, responsible for the triumph of the mediocre in American life? Here is a tantalizing thought on that subject from John Rao’s essay Americanism and the Collapse of the Church in the United States:

Many Americans continue to anathematize “high culture”. They characterize everything from architecture and music to cooking and clothing as silly, wasteful, and effeminate, the moment that it rises above the mediocre. Other Americans feel the need to escape the blandness around them. They cannot, however, bring themselves to flee from it by cultivating truly serious culture. This would so tie them into the Greco-Roman and Catholic tradition as to frighten them back into their mediocrity. Instead, they develop a new type of “high culture” based upon the mad, individualistic ravings of their tortured puritanical souls. Their “cultural” creations are then guiltily justified by them with reference to deep biological or psychological needs. The one group of secularized Puritans adores the Big Mac as the height of human achievement; the other, a homosexual’s multi-million dollar sculpture of a broken toothpick. In short, the Puritan, after his break with faith as during its full fervor, is unable to grasp the principle of restoring all things in Christ. He manifests his inability in either philistinism or perversion. If he does discover the true heritage of the West, he converts to Catholicism or plays carelessly with it like an adolescent plays haphazardly with things before which he should stand in awe.

PHILIP ZODHIATES, a Virginia businessman, last week became the second man convicted of kidnapping charges in the case of Lisa Miller, who fled with her seven-year-old daughter to Central America in 2009 when a family court gave sole custody of the child to her former lesbian partner, who was represented by attorneys for the militant homosexual organization, Lambda Legal, and the ACLU.

Zodhiates drove Miller from Virginia to western New York; she traveled from there to Canada. As a result, he faces up to eight years in prison. An Anabaptist minister, Kenneth Miller, is now serving a 27-month sentence for also allegedly helping Miller flee. He refused to testify in the Zodhiates case in Buffalo last week and was charged with contempt of court, for which he could face additional jail time. Read More »

AN interesting statistic:

For every official the United States public has elected, its government supports 5,000 unelected employees.

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU teaches literature to students who are unable to hold discussions on the assignments in complete sentences. Too many words can be a problem, he says, but then so can too few.

[O]ne way to die is to give up on language, to revert to speechlessness, so that, at first, one can only say yes or no, and finally only yes.

IN AN AGE of endless war and a $530-billion defense budget, how can the American military machine make itself look good to left-wing pacifists?

It can subsidize gender reassignment surgery.

OKLAHOMA Wesleyan University President Dr. Everett Piper at Life Site News:

“Now how in the world is it possible for anybody to be pro-woman if they now, under the Title IX ‘Dear Colleague’ letter, which tells us to deny the biological fact of the female, and give her rights — the biological female’s right to the athletic field and to her shower and to her toilet and to her facilities — give those rights to someone who fancies himself or fabricates female identity out of thin air?” Piper asked. Read More »

JOHN writes:

Frederick Bastiat, writing in his little book, The Law, made the profound observation that the perversion of law takes two divergent forms: simple greed, and the pretended love of humanity.  C. S. Lewis made a similar observation, as did Jesus when he singled out for special condemnation both the love of mammon and the moral hypocrisy of the religious leadership of the time.  What is profound is that these two styles of faithlessness––which on the surface seem to be opposed––both spring from the same root.  They are both forms of idolatry whereby the God of heaven is deposed in favor of the gods of self and of this world.

Sadly, Trump’s supporters believe he has the power to ensure America’s continued place as the world’s largest producer and consumer of material goods, as if this were the highest goal a nation and its people could aspire to.  Even so, he probably won’t succeed. Read More »

ALAN writes:

In a recent essay, the conservative writer Ehud Would cited a passage in a 2003 essay by Gary North about how it was once common in America for strangers traveling on Greyhound buses to sing during the ride. [“The Way We Were”, Aug. 18, 2016]

In the essay he cites, Gary North wrote:

“There is a scene in “It Happened One Night” (1934), where Clark Gable is riding in a bus. The bus is lighted inside, and everyone is singing.   For years, I thought that scene was filler. My friend and master journalist Otto Scott, age 85, tells me that singing on Greyhound buses was common in those days, though with lights off.  Strangers sang on buses. I cannot identify with such a world.”

Try a little harder, Gary. Singing on the bus is the kind of thing you get when people have heritage, culture, and values in common.  It is not the kind of thing you get in “multi-culture.”

A man who grew up in Cincinnati in the 1930s recalled how passengers on streetcars became friends during Sunday afternoon leisure rides:  “Soon the whole car would join together in a sing-along as we rode on into the fading day.”  [Edmund Withrow,“Trolley Tours Made Our Sundays Great”, Reminisce Magazine, March/April 1994, p. 21 ]

In June 1960 my mother and I were part of a tour group in California.  The group travelled by train and then by bus.  Destinations included Los Angeles, Yosemite National Park, and San Francisco.  Read More »

Madonna Under the Fir Trees, Lucas Cranach, 1510

HERE ARE two additional comments — powerful essays, really — to add to the long and sometimes heated discussion on  “Exercise and Femininity.” The first comment is from Mrs. W. (who goes by her full surname here). She began the original conversation. Stephen Ippolito also responds with further thoughts on the concept of dignity and how the Mother of God is the highest counter-force to feminism. It’s a long comment, but well worth reading in its entirety.

Mrs. Willodson writes:

Thank you for your opinions and for those of your readers. Most helpful to me was your comment:

“I think a woman should not rush too much or push. She should be as much as possible in a state of potential prayer.”

That is what woman is. Tranquility. Peace. Calm. Her husband, and children and everyone around her for that matter depend on her for this. Exercise and clothing (even posture, hand gestures, hair style, facial expressions, etc.) that don’t outwardly complement or cultivate this type of inner peace is unbecoming to a woman. Some of your readers may say that jogging or swimming or whatever brings them this inner peace. Indeed, I have before had the habit of “clearing my head” by running. But this is a farce. They are wrongly depending on a natural activity for inner peace instead of doing a supernatural one: prayer. And they are forgetting that they do not live for themselves. Men and women both need to act in such a way as to not cause scandal to others. Read More »

A SCENE from the TV show “Portlandia.”

Rabbis wholeheartedly welcome refugees to Texas, but are noticeably silent on the possibility of welcoming refugees to Israel, which is much closer to Syria and Africa — and has taken none. Do you think the idea that American Jews, with many noble exceptions, are collectively waging psychological and political warfare against the non-Jewish American people is an irrational conspiracy theory?

Here is an ongoing list of prominent anti-Goyimites. Many make a career out of vilifying, marginalizing, and demonizing whites and aggressively working for the wholesale transformation of Western society, or what’s left of it. And they call us the haters! The guilt industrial complex includes Jonathan Wittenberg (below), who wants the UK to welcome thousands more new immigrants, making the English a minority in their own land because “God loves the refugee,” and Ian Reifowitz, the Huffington Post journalist who says, “White identity offers bland nothingness or racism.” Imagine gentile intellectuals in Israel (there are few) making comparable arguments against the majority culture. You can’t imagine it because it wouldn’t happen. While white-bashing is de rigeur in American corporate and academic institutions, just watch what happens to any American intellectual who criticizes Jews. His career is over. He is defamed and stabbed relentlessly in the back until he is a bloodied non-person. Only a demented hater would dare to criticize the Holy People.

We’ve fought for them, we’ve died for them, we’ve cried for them. But after all that, they still don’t like us!

AN ANTIDOTE to the flattering eulogies in the mainstream press.

COMMENTARY by Jon Rappoport:

Holt adopted the persona of a machine, and he pulled it off.

Which means? This is where the world is heading, if the technocrats have anything to say about it. You “need the best data—and one day soon you’ll get the data from a computer your brain is connected to. All will be well.” Read More »

MRS. T. writes:

Eva Woods does not have the capacity for self sacrifice.

In the article she mentions a beautiful wedding held inside a 15th-century castle in Ireland. They took exotic vacations and owned a beautiful home. However one thing is glaringly obvious: No children. It is a shame because motherhood could have slowly chipped away at her debilitating ego.

Several of her friend’s marriages also failed around the same time. Again, there are no children. I’m starting to see a pattern. Read More »

[This entry has been revised and updated.]

I AM not a fan of Donald Trump, as readers of this site know. I am not a fan of the Trump-worshipping cult of Ann Coulter, David Duke and the Alt-Right. Truthfully, it repels me. I don’t think Trump will bring about some great American renaissance. Aside from his character, his casino/mafia connections, his very immoral personal life, his blistering attacks on other countries and peoples, his fanatical support for the terrorist state of Israel, his militarism, his choice of neocon advisors and his support for the totalitarian LGBT agenda, aside from the reality that our problems are systemic, I don’t trust him. I don’t trust that even his nationalism is genuine. He is in bed with an evil oligarchy. Will he make American great again? No, he won’t. It wasn’t great in the first place, and his solutions are band-aids at best. Will he effectively tackle the immigration problem? I am not convinced that he will. As for the economy, the $38 billion we are about to hand over to Israel would pay for a lot of college educations and create a lot of jobs. Where is Donald’s good business sense when you need it? We are a debt-ridden nation. We are enslaved to the Federal Reserve and its state-sponsored usury. He will not change that. A revolution against the American system, its cabal of controllers and its debt-based, predatory capitalism is in order.

What should we do with this election in the meantime? Which of these two shady characters is less likely to lead us to World War III and wreck the remaining semblance of order? It’s a tough question.

Read More »