MICHAEL RUSKIN writes:

U.S. President Barak Obama recently released information giving insight into the type of appalling behaviour the Russians are carrying out in Syria. Following the liberation of Palmyra, St. Petersburg conductor, Valeri Gergiev, thought up the idea of taking the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater there to perform a concert of Bach, Shchedrin and Prokofiev in the Roman Amphitheater. This was the first performance at the UNESCO site since the theatre was used by ISIS to hold public executions.

“I can assure the public we would have brought in Madonna and Beyoncé to perform instead. There would have been a  strong insistence that the music for such an event should  reflect the values which we think are important and worthy of promoting. It’s why we are invading countries and starting coups and wars,” Obama [should have] concluded while speaking from the White House.  

When a reporter asked how the U.S.A. could have liberated Palmyra as it was surreptitiously backing Daesh through its Saudi Allies, the president [should have] said that it didn’t matter, “What’s important is public perception and we’re good at manipulating that.”

FROM Henry Makow:

DR. THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The bathroom wars are not new. In the mid-1980s, I studied comparative literature in the graduate program at UCLA. The Comparative Literature Program was housed on the third floor in UCLA’s iconic Royce Hall, modeled after the Cathedral of Saint Ambrose in Milan. Although Royce Hall was one of the four large structures of Royce Quad, the original 1929 campus, its third floor was a fairly remote place. It might have been that remoteness that made it a place of rendezvous for campus (and undoubtedly for many off-campus) homosexuals, who, then as now, apparently get a “kick” from performing pornographic acts in public places. Read More »

FROM LifeSiteNews:

“What we are really talking about is the abolition of sex,” Stella Morabito, senior contributor to The Federalist and an expert on cults and propaganda, told LifeSiteNews.  “And it is sex that the trans project is serving to abolish legally, under the guise of something called ‘the gender binary.’  Its endgame is a society in which everyone is legally de-sexed.  No longer legally male or female.  And once you basically redefine humanity as sexless you end up with a de-humanized society in which there can be no legal ‘mother’ or ‘father’ or ‘son’ or ‘daughter’ or ‘husband’ or ‘wife’ without permission from the State.  Government documents are already erasing the terms.  In such a society, the most intimate human relationships take a hit. The family ends up abolished.”

“A sexless society is ultimately a totalitarian society because it erases in law the most basic human relationships,” said Morabito, “particularly the mother-child bond.”

Pro-family advocates have for years warned that the weakening of family bonds leads to a weakened society and greater government involvement in the individual lives of its citizens.

FROM an article by Frank Ching:

Much has been said about China’s growing nationalism but little attention has been paid to its increasing assertion of something akin to sovereignty over ethnic Chinese who are citizens of other countries.

While this is particularly noteworthy in Hong Kong, it is also true in the United States, Australia and other countries.

What China wants is for foreign citizens of ethnic Chinese background to be loyal to the “motherland” – meaning China – regardless of their citizenship and to work to further the interests of China.

This was disclosed in the People’s Daily a couple of years ago when it encouraged “more and more overseas Chinese to participate in the local political life”.

FROM an article in The Daily Caller by Emmett McGroarty and Jane Robbins:

Headmaster John Vallance pronounced the billions of dollars spent on classroom technology a “scandalous waste of money” that “distracts” from quality teaching. “We see teaching as fundamentally a social activity,” Dr. Vallance said. “It’s about interaction between people, about discussion, about conversation. We find that having laptops or iPads in the classroom inhibits conversation – it’s distracting.”

Dr. Vallance identified a related problem with technological “personalized learning” – when conversation is removed from education, the students find themselves confronted with a uniform point of view. “The digital delivery of teaching materials across Australia has had a powerful normative effect,” he observed. “It’s making it quite difficult for children to learn how to disagree, how not to toe the party line, because they can’t question things – the possibility of questioning things has been taken away from them.”

So according to a prominent educator who has seen the results in the classroom, digital learning increases the likelihood of, well, indoctrination. Bill Gates, who through his vast wealth pushes his well-known political and cultural predilections, apparently sees no problem with this. Parents might disagree. [emphasis added]

MIKE KING uses some strong language to comment on the West Point cadets who posed in a pre-graduation photo last week flashing the raised-fist, Communist salute:

As controversy over the photo emerged, the terrorist-sympathizing skanks in question quickly shifted into that “I dindu nuffin” mode that works so well for them — assuring detractors that the clenched fist pose was only meant as a show of sisterly solidarity, not cop-killing, bigotry or revolution. This explanation is, of course, a lie — itself an expellable offense from honor-based West Point. The clenched fist salute stands for Communist Power and/or one of its evil spawns, Black Power — and these catty cadets with scowls on their faces damn well know it! Read More »

YES, Capitalism is just as oppressive as Communism. In that vein, Stephen Turley has an excellent article at The Imaginative Conservative on corporate support for laws mandating unisex restrooms:

Predictably, the so-called “bathroom bill” was greeted with sweeping denunciations from the political left. What was surprising was the volume of outcry toward the law leveled by corporations such as Apple, Starbucks, Kellogg’s, and PayPal who, along with more than 100 CEOs, signed an open letter urging the repeal of this “discriminatory and radical new anti-LGBT law.”[1] Even the NBA suggested that it would move the All-Star Game if the law wasn’t repealed.[2]  Such tactics echoed earlier threats by Disney, Intel, Dow Chemical, and the NFL to boycott Georgia if its governor signed a so-called “religious freedom” bill, which would allow faith-based organizations to deny services to those who violated their religious beliefs.

But why on earth do CEOs care so much about this? Why do they act as if they have a dog in this fight? Why are they so adamantly siding with such a small percentage of the population?

I believe that the key to understanding this corporate solidarity with transgenders is to see it as part of a mass process known as globalization. Considered the defining trait of modernity, globalization involves what is in effect a worldwide social system constituted by a capitalist economy, telecommunications, technology, and mass urbanization.[3] What is crucial for us to observe is that globalization involves a social dynamic known as disembedding, which is a propelling of social and economic factors away from localized control toward more transnational processes. For example, think of your local mall: In one sense, the mass shopping complex is in fact local in terms of its proximity to consumers; but notice that the retail outlets that comprise the various stores at a mall are not local but rather national and international chains and brand names. This is especially the case with the latest releases at the movie theater or the offerings at the food court. This is disembedding: from the ubiquity of “Made in China” imprints on our products and consumables, to the mass influx of immigrant labor, both legal and illegal, and the ever-increasing “Orlando-ization” of our urban and suburban landscapes by chains and franchises, our lives are increasingly defined and interpreted by translocal economic and social processes.

Globalization is the inevitable outcome of an economic order that puts profit above all else.

Wilton Diptych, 1395

The Wreath with which we are to Crown  Our Lady Queen of May

We’ll twine the rose that early blows
With the lily of the vale;
And violet we won’t forget,
That scents the morning gale.

Chorus
Flowers are springing, birds are singing,
The earth is bright and gay,
Then let us weave a blooming wreath
For Mary, Queen of May. Read More »

THIS is a wonderful excerpt of a 1978 recording of Eugene Ormandy conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in a performance of the Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a symphonic suite based on The Arabian Nights. I am going to refrain from politically incorrect observations at this time. I don’t want to bore you, offend talented female musicians or insult conductors who think they are above wearing a tuxedo.

DAVID C. writes:

I hadn’t visited your website in quite a while but stopped by a few minutes ago to peruse your latest writings. I read “Feminist Jorge.” You are one of literally two people on the Internet who can be counted upon to write with incisive clarity on a regular basis. Always refreshing and always sad for being so rare.

As for feminist Whore-Hay, I actually left the Church some time ago because of his sort of nonsense. There is no Catholic Church and the beliefs you espouse, however beautiful, turn out simply to have no basis in reality. We both know the teachings of the Church cannot be meaningful if the Church itself is not real, and the wholesale abandonment of Catholicism by Catholic bishops proves that it is not.
Read More »

THE idea that the world is overpopulated and thus cannot sustain high fertility is one of the most well-funded ideas in the 21st century. Bill and Melinda Gates, for example, are developing new ways to sterilize humanity as we speak — and spending billions on it.

But overpopulation is also a patently false idea when presented as scientific fact, based as it is on subjective standards of what is good. It is a concept propelled into wide circulation by poor thinking and also by misanthropy — a real and true disdain for human beings.

In his book The Death of Christian Culture, John Senior explains why we cannot ever project scientifically that the world will have too many people and why we can confidently say, “The more the merrier:”

The Zero Population Group prefers contraception and abortion because, they say, the world cannot support geometrically increasing numbers of people. They have revived the error of the eighteenth century amateur sociologist, Malthus, who applied the abstract science of geometry to concrete, real, contingent, human — and therefore capricious — beings, which never works. If such and such a trend continues, he said, such and such occurs. But such and such a trend does not continue and surprises undreamt of occur. As it turns out — we know this not by geometric projection but by observation of what has happened — in the first stages of transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, there is a population spurt because medical technology reduces infant deaths. But then fertility falls off as industrialization advances. There are spurts again in times of happiness and hope; a few year’s peace after war, prosperity after depression, freedom from totalitarianism. There have been local jiggles upward when an ice storm breaks the power lines and kills the television set, when husbands and wives discover an unexpected night of happiness and hope away from the latest news.

But the chilling truth is that industrialism brings on paralyzing gluttony and greed in which the quality of life is quantified. Paradoxically, you cannot afford to have children in the affluent society. The world has never been so rich and wretched as in these air-conditioned Edens where another child would sap the payments on the second car. There is no population bomb today. Quite the opposite: the question is whether industrialized society can reproduce itself at all. Read More »

M. OLIVER HEYDORN critiques the political objective of full employment from a social credit perspective. Social credit advocates insist modern technology has rendered full employment impossible, and yet the fruits of technology, combined with a better and more just monetary system, can provide a basic income to all.

He writes:

One of the axioms of the existing economic order is the policy of ‘Full Employment’ (FE). Everyone must work for his daily bread or be dependent on those who do (via either redistributive taxation or increased public borrowings meted out in the form of welfare, unemployment insurance, pensions, etc.) when he is unable to work or when insufficient work is available.

Such a policy makes absolutely no sense. It is neither necessary nor possible to realize it.

It is not necessary because we are physically capable of producing everything that people can use with profit to themselves while only calling on a minority of the available labour force and the situation is steadily improving or deteriorating – depending on your point of view. Because of continuing (not to say ‘accelerating’) technological advancements, we can produce more and/or better with fewer and fewer people working. Indeed, it has been predicted that 50% of existing jobs in the US will be automated within 20 years. This is a hard fact of life. Insisting on full employment in the face of the fourth industrial revolution is simply puritanical foolishness which is bound to increase unnecessary strains and stresses until we reach a breaking point … from which they may be no return. Read More »

A FICTIONAL dialogue between a robot and a human being, written by Carey Henderson, a writer who has contributed perceptive comments here about popular culture.

ELLEN BROWN, author of Web of Debt, writes:

In November 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Bank of North Dakota (BND), the nation’s only state-owned depository bank, was more profitable even than J.P. Morgan Chase and Goldman Sachs. The author attributed this remarkable performance to the state’s oil boom; but the boom has now become an oil bust, yet the BND’s profits continue to climb. Its 2015 Annual Report, published on April 20th, boasted its most profitable year ever. Read More »

MOTHER of God, save us from this evil man. Save us by your maternal intercessions from this antipope who uses the code language and feel-good platitudes of revolution to denigrate the moral power of femininity; who seduces so many with his shrewd and preternatural sentimentality; who reveres worldly, masculine “success;” who trades in Marxist lies; who falsely accuses men of enslaving women by not paying them equal wages; who never speaks of the destructive envy and lust for power of feminism; who implies that women are not subject to the effects of Original Sin; who evidently believes the autonomous, material condition of women is more important than the spiritual and life-giving work they do for no pay; and who never once mentions you, Holy Queen, the highest model of feminine virtue, in his despicable propaganda piece on the role of women.

To thee our love and troth are given. 
Pray for us, pray, bright Gate of Heaven.
Sweet Day-Star! let thy beauty be 
A light to draw my soul to thee.

We love thee, light of sinners’ eyes! 
Oh let thy prayer for sinners rise.
Look at us, Mother Mary! see 
How piteously we look to thee.

Vittorio Crivelli