ANN CORCORAN at Refugee Resettlement Watch writes:

Huge companies, many of them multinational corporations, are, according to the International Rescue Committee (America’s wealthiest refugee contracting agency), scooping up refugee workers and training them apparently rather than spending the money to train needy African American or other American citizens.

The International Rescue Committee tells us that ‘do-gooderism’ is secondary to making smart business decisions that they say are driving these companies. (Ha! I bet the IRC’s volunteers think this is all about humanitarian zeal!)

Americans first!

Wouldn’t it be smart to train and hire needy American citizens first especially in cities hard hit by unemployment that leads to hopelessness and crime? Apparently not!

OBAMA has pledged $38 billion to Israel over a ten year period, starting in 2017. It is the largest military aid package in U.S. history.

Meanwhile, about 40,000 American veterans of recent wars are homeless on any given night.

FROM The Great Truths, Daily Meditations by Rev. R. F. Clarke, S. J.:

We are all of us jealous of what belongs to ourselves. We resent it if any one interferes with it, or deprives us of any portion of it. Yet no one owns anything by a title so absolute as that by which God is the Lord and owner of all creatures in the universe. My body and my soul are His; everything I possess is His; every action, every thought belongs to Him. He has given all these in charge to me to use for Him. Do I do so?

God is moreover a God infinite in knowledge and in power. His all-seeing eye overlooks nothing, forgets nothing, passes nothing by. No one shall escape who takes anything from Him, and does not give Him His due. God will not forget the ill use that men make of His gifts, though they themselves soon forget it. Have I not therefore cause to tremble when I think how often I have behaved as if I were my own master, independent of God? Read More »

A MUST-SEE video (though not for the faint of heart). Read More »

MAKE-UP companies advertise products that are “cruelty-free” to animals while at the same time encouraging women to look cruel.

Kidist Paulos Asrat contemplates one make-up company’s pitch.

THE Brookings Institute says Europeans who are upset about the influx of immigrants are suffering from a neurotic fear of change. Matthew Groh and Tara Vishwanath write:

We find that neophobia—the fear of anything new and unfamiliar—is one of the root causes of anti-immigration opinion. Since immigrants are both foreign and unfamiliar, neophobes are often lumped together with xenophobes as people who fear immigrants. The difference is that neophobes overcome their fear through acquaintance, whereas xenophobes hold their fears constant. Read More »

FRANZ HÖRMANN, professor of accounting at the University of Economics in Vienna, explains what is wrong with our monetary system.

Money should be in the service of production and families; production and families should not be in the service of money.

THERE is reason to suspect that the person who emerged from Chelsea Clinton’s apartment on Sunday after Hillary Clinton’s collapse at a 9/11 memorial was not Hillary Clinton. The contrast was so noticeable that even the mainstream media has covered the story. The double was thinner than Hillary and was conspicuously not surrounded by body guards, as if a full view of her as healthy and not debilitated was desired. It is unlikely that she could have recovered this quickly (within 90 minutes), if she did indeed collapse. If this was a double, it had to have been arranged well in advance.

[Update: It couldn’t be a Hillary impersonator. The voice in this video is definitely that of Hillary.] Read More »

DONALD TRUMP is the first presidential candidate who has spoken of the possibility of a rigged election. The website Election Night Gatekeepers looks at the vote-counting process, and it ain’t pretty:

This is what happens on the November election night across the USA since at least as far back as 1988:

Four Three Mysterious Mega-Companies “count” the vote on the November Election Night.

One of the traits of these “Election Count” gatekeepers is that they periodically change names, and/or buy each other, but the players and background forces remain essentially the same. These surface changes of ownership and change of names seems designed to give the impression that the gatekeepers are diverse as opposed to comprising a monolithic force, and perhaps to try and keep ahead of the investigations and criminal indictments that should have come long ago. Read More »

Baghdad, 2003

ON a week that marks the 15th-anniversary of 9/11, it’s incumbent on Americans to recall the death and destruction the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 ultimately brought to the mostly Muslim country of Iraq. The second Iraq war began in March, 2003. The author David Swanson wrote in 2013:

At 10 years since the launch of Operation Iraqi Liberation (to use the original name with the appropriate acronym, OIL) and over 22 years since Operation Desert Storm, there is little evidence that any significant number of people in the United States have a realistic idea of what our government has done to the people of Iraq, or of how these actions compare to other horrors of world history. A majority of Americans believe the war since 2003 has hurt the United States but benefitted Iraq. A plurality of Americans believe, not only that Iraqis should be grateful, but that Iraqis are in fact grateful. Read More »

THE FIRST Anti-Vatican II song, Vatican 2! What the Heck Are You?, has been released by True Restoration, and it’s a winner! It’s a catchy tune, sung and performed by the outstanding Damo, and I know you’ll like it. “Oh, Vatican Two! You are the Great Apostasy!… Oh, Vatican Two! It’s easy to tell, You’re not from heaven, You are straight from Hell!” Sing it after the latest Bergoglian bombs have been detonated. Listen here or here.

Oh Vatican Two! Influenced by Bugnini, instead of wine and bread you’re using beer and linguini
You’ve stolen our churches, cathedrals, and our name, our monasteries and convents which soon we will reclaim.

Oh Vatican Two! Where did you come from? If you did not exist I would not have to sing this song!
Religious Liberty, and Existentialism, the Dignity of Man, and False Ecumenism.

Oh Vatican Two! Your days are numbered. Your cupboard is bare just like Mother Hubbard.
The truth never changes this is not to be debated
We look forward to the day when you will be annihilated!

O Glorious Prince of the Heavenly Host, St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

FROM the satirical publication, The Onion:

In an effort to strengthen their relationship and foster interfaith dialogue, Pope Francis reportedly welcomed the winged Mayan snake god Kukulkan to the Vatican this week as part of a month-long deity exchange program. “We are excited to have the War Serpent staying here with us for the next four weeks, during which time he’ll be exposed to the rituals and customs of the Catholic Church, so that when he returns home he can share the experience with his adherents in Chichén Itzá and the surrounding Yucután communities,” said Vatican spokesperson Greg Burke, noting that the pontiff had taken Kukulkan out for pizza on the first night of the exchange before showing him around some of Rome’s most famous landmarks.

HILLARY’S illness is genuine, in my opinion, but it may be more serious than she is letting on.

Mike King at The Anti-New York Times considers several other possibilities, including this one:

The illness and the E-mail scandal are part of a clever pity & divert strategy to prevent the Trump campaign and the “conservative” media from attacking a poor sick little woman (the pity); and to focus on controversies other than the dozen or so women that Bill Clinton has raped, groped and flashed (the diversion) — some of whom Killary has intimidated or ridiculed. The “Rape Card” is the one issue [that] would destroy Killary in a matter of days, and it strikes fear into the black hearts of the Marxists. All Killary has to do is “recover” a few weeks before the election and it will then be to late for Trump to counter-attack and play the long awaited “Rape Card” — which Trump and adviser Roger Stone had both so carelessly telegraphed months ago.

Source

HILLARY kept her pneumonia diagnosis secret for three days.

School buildings, like this state-of-the-art school in Casper, Wyoming, lack intimacy and beauty

ALAN writes:

Like A. Wood, I was a school resister.  But I was much dumber than him.  I sat through nine years of it as an obedient little lamb.  And then I became a rebel.

In “Boys Hate School” [ Oct. 29, 2015 ], you wrote:  “The modern secular school is an impersonal factory.”

You are too generous.  I suggest that modern secular schools are child-crushing factories.

Schooling has nothing to do with learning.  It has to do with power, babysitting, and hatred of responsibility:  Power over parents and children throughout an artificially-prolonged childhood, and hatred of responsibility by parents who think their children should be somebody else’s responsibility.

It was in the mid-1960s that I came to hate schooling.

In the 1930s, my mother and uncle walked to their parochial school in south St. Louis.   But my uncle was not fond of school.  On some days he persuaded my mother to play hooky with him.  At age 14 he quit school and got a job within walking distance from their home.  It was possible to do that in those years, and it was work that he wanted to do.  Fortunately my grandparents had the supreme good sense not to call him a “dropout”, not to cajole him into going back to school, and not to call in “experts” or “professionals” to “help” him adjust himself to other people’s expectations of what he should be doing.  Instead, they had the profound wisdom to leave him alone.  They knew he was happy and was contributing to the family income.  There were no problems.  He got along just fine. Read More »

MARK VOROBEJ, an associate professor at McMaster University in Canada, taught third- and fourth-year undergraduate philosophy students a course in argumentation theory, in which they evaluated arguments put forth by the author David Lee Griffin against the official account of 9/11. Most of the students were initially unaware of any controversy. Vorobej showed them the movie “9/11 Mysteries” first (if you haven’t seen this movie, I highly recommend it) and they then read Griffin’s book The New Pearl Harbor. The students, whom had all completed at least one course in logic, had many thoughtful responses. By the end, all rejected the official story. See Vorobej’s essay, “Obstacles to Persuasion: Lessons from the Classroom” here.

Litchfield Female Academy Embroidery

CAROLINE, a homeschooling mother, writes:

I’m kind of enjoying what my daughter and I are studying. Our poet is Robert Frost. I came to a new appreciation of his work through your blog. Today we read the following and it brought tears to my eyes (but not my daughter’s of course). I find poems more poignant when read aloud.

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things (from New Hampshire, 1923)

— Robert Frost

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.