HILLARY CLINTON engages in some Orwellian ‘doublethink’ on the issue of women and the draft. She should be hailing this development, all the major feminists should, since she has always stood for women doing everything men do. But the draft, that’s problematic.

How does she get around this bind? She says the draft itself is a problem. High five, Hillary! You’re a master.

“I have to think about whether it’s necessary to go as far as our military officers are recommending,” Clinton responded. “From my perspective, the all-volunteer military has worked and we should not do anything that undermines it because it has provided a solid core of people who are willing to serve our country.”

The question for now, however, is whether women should be required to register with the Selective Service, as men are. She skirts that issue.

MARK Jaws writes:

Murders of women tourists in black-run countries are sadly becoming an increasingly frequent occurrence. Just a week or two ago, I discussed the murder of Anne Swaney in Belize, and how reckless her actions had been. To remind those who may have forgotten, Ms. Swaney walked down to a river by herself to do yoga exercises in a BRC. Not very smart.

On January 24, another white woman was killed in a BRC – this one, Grenada. Apparently Jessica Colker did not hike down to a secluded river by herself, but merely was walking along the beach with her 62-year-old husband when the savage rapist attacked. Read More »

MORE THAN half of London is non-British. Harriet Sergeant writes about a new book on the subject in The Daily Mail.  Read More »

THE blasphemous, attention-loving Suor Cristina performs in the musical Sister Act in Italy.

Commentary and photos here. (Title to this entry courtesy of Novus Ordo Watch news digest.)

IF THERE are men trapped in women’s bodies and women trapped in men’s bodies and billionaires trapped in middle class housewives, why can’t there be cats trapped in the bodies of human beings? From Lifesite News:

“Nano,” a 20-year-old Norwegian woman, says she realized at 16 that she is, in fact, a cat.

“I was born the wrong species,” Nano says, explaining that because of a genetic defect, she is a cat trapped in a human body. Read More »

The troops in North Korea

A MALE READER writes:

I am the father of two daughters.

In a healthy society, the military’s purpose is to protect its families from threats of harm.

But, by definition, proposing to register my daughters for forced military conscription, as the U.S. military’s leaders have just done, is a threat of harm.

This is perverse. Read More »

SOME words to ponder in this “Year of Mercy” from an article about Spotlight, a movie about the clerical abuse scandal:

Justice in an important part of Catholic theology and ecclesiology. It is often, wrongly, defined in the popular consciousness as the opposite of mercy. In fact, in the mind of the Church they are inseparable; Thomas Aquinas defined the relationship by saying that justice without mercy is cruelty, but mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution. Read More »

Tres Riches Heures, Feast of the Purification

The Dream of the Candle

A Tale from the Golden Legend 
By Jacobus de Voragine, A.D. 1275

We read an example of a noble lady which had great devotion in the blessed Virgin Mary, and she had a chapel in which she did do say mass of our Lady daily by her chaplain. It happed that the day of the purification of our Lady, her chaplain was out, so that this lady might that day have no mass, and she durst not go to another church because she had given her mantle unto a poor man for the love of our Lady. She was much sorrowful because she might hear no mass and for to make her devotions she went into the chapel, and tofore the altar she kneeled down for to make her prayers to our Lady.

And anon she fell asleep, in which she had a vision, and her seemed that she was in a church, and saw come into the church a great company of virgins, tofore whom she saw come a right noble virgin crowned right preciously. And when they were all set each in order, came a company of young men which sat down each after other in order like the other; after, entered one that bare a burden of candles, and departed them to them above first, and so to each of them by order he gave one, and at the last came this man to this lady aforesaid and gave to her also a candle of wax.  Read More »

Stefano da Zevio, Madonna in the Rosary 1410

TODAY is the ancient holiday of Candelmas, which takes place on the Feast of the Purification and once represented the closing of the Christmas season. From Fish Eaters:

Today is a day of purification, renewal, and hope. On this day, exactly 40 days after Christmas, we commemorate Mary’s obedience to the Mosaic law by submitting herself to the Temple for the ritual purification, as commanded in Leviticus:

Leviticus 12:2-8
Speak to the children of Israel, and thou shalt say to them: If a woman having received seed shall bear a man child, she shall be unclean seven days, according to the days of separation of her flowers. And on the eighth day the infant shall be circumcised: But she shall remain three and thirty days in the blood of her purification. She shall touch no holy thing: neither shall she enter into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification, be fulfilled. But if she shall bear a maid child, she shall be unclean two weeks, according to the custom of her monthly courses, and she shall remain in the blood of her purification sixty-six days.

And when the days of her purification are expired, for a son, or for a daughter, she shall bring to the door of the tabernacle of the testimony, a lamb of a year old for a holocaust, and a young pigeon or a turtle for sin, and shall deliver them to the priest: Who shall offer them before the Lord, and shall pray for her, and so she shall be cleansed from the issue of her blood. This is the law for her that beareth a man child or a maid child.

And if her hand find not sufficiency, and she is not able to offer a lamb, she shall take two turtles, or two young pigeons, one for a holocaust, and another for sin: and the priest shall pray for her, and so she shall be cleansed.

[…]

 This very ancient carol also speaks of the departure of Christmas on this day. It is called “I Am Christmas,” and was written by James Ryman, a Franciscan Friar, ca. 1492. Note that the reference to Hallowtide (the days of the dead centering around All Saints Day) here refers to the fact that it was during Hallowtide that monarchs used to announce where they would be spending Christmas.

I Am Christmas

Here have I dwelled with more or lass
From Hallowtide till Candelmas,
And now must I from you hens pass;
Now have good day.

I take my leve of king and knight,
And erl, baron, and lady bright;
To wilderness I must me dight;
Now have good day!

And at the good lord of this hall
I take my leve, and of gestes all;
Me think I here Lent doth call;
Now have good day!

And at every worthy officere,
Marshall, panter, and butlere
I take my leve as for this yere;
Now have good day!

Another yere I trust I shall
Make mery in this hall,
If rest and peace in England fall;
Now have good day!

But oftentimes I have herd say
That he is loth to part away
That often biddeth ‘Have good day!”;
Now have good day!

Now fare ye well, all in fere,
Now fare ye well for all this yere;
Yet for my sake make ye good chere;
Now have good day!

WHEN a corporate plutocrat in charge of one of the largest propaganda companies in the world urges people to give their entire lives to their jobs, to “lean in” as she likes to put it, shouldn’t people be just a tad suspicious of her motives? Is it possible that the marginalization of leisure and the family just might be in her interests?

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook and author of bestselling Lean In, has been pushing the gender revolution for years and she gets more and more ridiculous as she goes. Here she is at the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, where the oligarchy meets to wage psychological warfare against families and nations and to promote the global triumph of the debt-finance system. (Do you believe there is even such a thing as the World Economic Forum!? What chutzpah these people have! Seriously, they can’t even disguise their blatant intentions for world control.) From Sandberg:

“We assign our chores to our children in the United States, and it can be worse in other parts of the world… The boys are taking out the trash, it takes less time than cleaning the dishes and they get bigger allowances. We start out in our homes with these very different expectations and the time spent on these tasks is incredibly important.”

She went on:

It doesn’t stop there: “Mothers will systematically overestimate their sons’ crawling, and underestimate their daughters’.”

I’m sorry to be cynical, but I believe the ridiculousness of these remarks is calculated. It is calculated to get attention and cause discussion and petty strife. Conflict and emotional disagreements keep the people from wondering why the heck anyone is listening to this billionaire slave driver in the first place.

The war against male and female, against little boys who take out the trash (as if there were any of those in America), is a war against the financial sovereignty of nations and families. It’s a war against the home and the homeland. When the home becomes a sea of divided loyalties, when the homeland is all conflict, the people are citizens of nowhere and accept their bondage to unseen, mystical financial forces, such as those represented at Davos. Their loyalty is to the Firm and its partner, the collectivist utopia.

Capitalism and Communism are two sides of the same coin. They destroy traditional culture and replace it with the rule of money.

I would just like to say one more thing. Sheryl Sandberg is a megalomaniac. Read More »

SOME Youtube analysis of the Robert “LaVoy” Finicum shooting in Oregon. Finicum’s actions and the filming of the event are suggestive of stagecraft. Was this a case of manufactured dissent?

A LONG article by Ellen Barry in The New York Times examines efforts by male elders in a small Indian village to keep some women from working in local factories. It’s an interesting, meticulously-reported piece, an exposé of primitive patriarchy in a small corner of the world where the misogynistic men would rather be poor than have their women leave home for paying jobs in smelly factories.

These men are clearly doomed.

The women in dispute had previously earned money by begging. They accept jobs in meat-packing factories. The ringleader of the group is a model of feminine affability, just the sort of woman the Times envisions as modernizing this backward land.

Geeta, the younger of the two, was born angry. Even as a child, if her siblings took her portion of food, she was apt to throw everyone’s dinner into the dirt. “A real bastard-woman,” one neighbor called her, eyes widening with admiration.

“Let their ladies sit and cook for them,” Geeta would hiss to her friend Premwati, as they walked together past their neighbors. “Our husbands are with us.”

[…]

“Her husband is like a chicken — if she tells him to get up, he will get up!” chuckled the chief in the town where she grew up.

I bet she’s a good cook too.

The village has traditionally looked down on women working side by side with strange men. One of the male elders orders that the women be shunned and everyone in the village complies. Much drama results, the sort of thing that could only occur in a place where, bizarrely, everyone knows everyone else.

The Times does not like the fact that the labor force participation rate of women in India has fallen (it now stands at a low 27 percent).  Read More »

ZIPPY CATHOLIC writes:

These links to some of my views and explanations may be pertinent to your readers when considering the issues of money and lending/credit.

I explain what fiat money is here and here. I explain why fiat dollars are (counterintuitively) more transparent and honest than gold backed dollars here. I explain why currency debasement is immoral here. I explain that banks only ‘create money’ because of usury here, where I include an explanation of why non-usurious bank loans do not involve ‘creation of money.’ And I explain what usury is and is not here.

Unsurprisingly, the core problem is usury: an execrable and really rather simple to understand sin which the Church had condemned in a full-throated manner consistently for millennia up until the mid 1800’s.  Usury only started to seem obscure and difficult to understand to many people by the late middle ages, because of propaganda which confused very different sorts of contracts and property arrangements all under the single equivocal term “loan.” Read More »

DID PEOPLE with foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks make vast sums through insider trading and insurance schemes? The Corbett Report presents evidence that they did.

The transcript can be found here.

ANGELA writes:

Do you get tired of the insinuation that our country’s economic problems are a result of the individual greed of Americans? What is wrong with having a house and a car and an occasional vacation? I found that even a camping trip is very expensive! Would someone say a person was greedy because he went camping for a week? And yet that can amount to more than a thousand dollars if you have a family and want to go somewhere nice. Why should any American want to live in an unsafe house and drive a broken down car? In the end, the price is often still very high! I do not think it is greed to want a new couch or to remodel your house.

There was a man from Europe who visited us once who said all he heard back home was how greedy Americans were. Yet after being here awhile, all he saw was how hard they worked, and how polite they were compared to his country. He said even the women at home were always on their feet, working. Read More »

DON’T watch this with children in the room!

CAN THE skateboard mass be far behind? More here. Read More »

ASH WEDNESDAY is less than two weeks away, which means the happiness of Easter Sunday is nine weeks away. We should prepare for Lent now. Sloth is part of human nature. Self denial wouldn’t be self denial if it came naturally. Dr. Thomas Droleskey writes at Christ or Chaos:

 We must start thinking about our Lenten resolutions now, gradually withdrawing ourselves from the “rush” and the “pull” of the world. Ash Wednesday will be here in but a blink of an eye.

And, our lives will be over in the blink of an eye too. We have only so long to express our love for God and sorrow for our sins in this vale of tears.

Here are the Seven Penitential Psalms in Latin and English, a small part of the ancient liturgical treasury of aids to remorse. Penance is different from wallowing in guilt. It is the transformation of guilt into love.