November 30, 2015
ACCORDING TO the Physicians for Social Responsibility, 1.6 million people, mostly civilians, have been killed in the U.S.-led wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. A full report can be found here.
November 30, 2015
António de Oliveira Salazar
HENRIQUE N. writes:
I’m from Portugal and I live and work in London. I’ve been following The Thinking Housewife for a while now. I really appreciate it and it’s refreshing to see there are still lucid people in what, from my perspective, seems a thoroughly alienated country (not that we’re faring much better here however).
I wanted to write a few times before but I always felt there wasn’t much I could add to the discussions happening. I’ve decided to do it now.
I did not know Amintore Fanfani and I will try to read some of his works, but I would like to point you to something related that you and your readers might find interesting. As you might know, Portugal was governed for about 40 years (1926 – 1974) by what is normally called a dictatorship. In reality, there was indeed a military dictatorship between 1926 and 1933 during which the armed forces actually held power. In 1933 a new Constitution was proclaimed and the country returned to constitutional rule of law. This new state called itself “Estado Novo” which literally means “New State.” The architect of all this was, as you might know, Prof. António de Oliveira Salazar. Read More »
November 29, 2015
SOME interesting posts about Advent traditions, including one on the Advent calendar, can be found at It’s About Time.
November 26, 2015
Still-Life, Gillis Gillisz de Bergh; 1637-39
HAPPY THANKSGIVING to American readers of this site. May you have a happy and peaceful day with your families. Since this is a day of national gratitude, you may enjoy this essay, “National Greatness” by Orestes Brownson, who wrote in 1846:
That this is a great country, if we speak of the territory, is very true, though not much greater than China, and far less than Russia, and withal a great part of it as yet uncultivated, and no little of it even untrodden by civilized man. But whether we are a great people or not, or whether we have any special ground of self-adulation, is another and a different question; and a question which will be variously answered, according to the views which are taken of what constitutes true national greatness. Our judgments of the comparative greatness of different nations depend entirely on the standard of greatness we adopt, and by which we judge them. We call a people great or small in proportion as they do or do not conform to our standard of greatness. Vary the standard, and we vary our judgment. The people we called great, when indeed by one standard, we may call not great, if judged by a different standard. All, therefore, depends on the standard we adopt. Consequently, in order to determine whether we are really a great people or not, we must first determine what is the true standard of national greatness.
What, then, is true national greatness? We answer, that nation is greatest in which man may most easily and effectually fulfil the true and proper end of man. Read More »
November 25, 2015
Amintore Fanfani with his first wife, Bianca Rosa, and two of their seven children
TO BE an anti-capitalist is to be a socialist or a Marxist, right? To most American conservatives, there is no third way. One must believe fervently in the “free market” or be a Communist.
Amintore Fanfani, the Italian economic historian and politician who was six times prime minister, was one of the more eloquent critics of this false dialectic. In his 1930 book Catholicism, Protestantism and Capitalism, [IHS Press, 2003] Fanfani, who died at the age of 91 in 1999, wrote that no Christian can reasonably support capitalism or socialism. The third way is not a political platform but a mode of thinking, a way of viewing economic life as part of the supernatural order. Capitalism itself is a worldview or an orientation more than a technique or fixed system. Entirely naturalistic, capitalism is not the great antithesis of Communism it is believed to be. Indeed, Communism is a realization of the capitalistic spirit and one form of its capture of the instruments of the state and an entire society. Read More »
November 25, 2015
THIS Youtube poster makes similar points to those I made in a previous post about the phony suicide bombing in the Comptoir Voltaire in Paris. He finds Masonic symbolism in the staged event.
Earlier in the week, the media reported the story of a nurse who supposedly performed CPR on the suicide bomber. [Do paramedics normally perform CPR on someone with a gaping “hole” in his side? I would think that would increase the loss of blood. But, wait a sec, there is no blood in this scene.] Whoever staged this event is so confident of the ability to deceive today’s gullible masses who gulp down anything the media feeds them that they did not even bother to remove glasses and plates from the table next to the alleged bomber. Quite an explosion. They are probably howling with laughter at how easy it is to con millions. To them, this kind of deception must create a high — a euphoria that is like a drug.
November 23, 2015
TWO DAYS after the recent Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, 27, was identified by French authorities as the Muslim terrorist who planned and executed the attacks. Even though French intelligence agents apparently knew nothing about his plans and those of his cohorts before the attacks, in a mere two days they knew all about Abaaoud’s role and had a full portfolio on him to release to the press in what was a staggeringly short time in the world of police investigations. The news stories immediately broadcast that he was the “mastermind” behind the attacks. They even knew about his efforts to recruit his own 13-year-old brother.
Abaaoud, who grew up in the Moleenbeck district of Belgium, was allegedly well known for his terrorist activities and was even questioned in January in Belgium. He was so well known, in fact, that he posed on the cover of an ISIS magazine, Dabiq. Bet you didn’t know ISIS has its own magazine! And yet despite this publicity he was able to circumvent Frances strict gun control laws to obtain assault weapons for his ISIS fanatics and provide them with malfunctioning suicide vests. Abaaoud was such a mastermind that he apparently planned no effective escape after the attacks and was even seen on a street of Paris drinking whiskey.
Abaaoud was killed in a police raid last Wednesday. He was not only shot by snipers but blown to bits by grenades. Abaaoud will not be standing trial or conducting any more interviews. He had to be identified by DNA samples in swabs of his saliva.
November 23, 2015
ANTI-GLOABLIST EXPATRIATE writes:
Barry C. Lynn has an article at Harper’s on “The New China Syndrome: American Business Meets its New Master.” He writes:
As our biggest manufacturers and traders and investors succeed in China, they also come to depend on China for future profits — which brings them increasingly under the sway of a Chinese state that holds the power to cut those profits off. What if the master capitalists and corporate bosses who have so cowed us here at home are themselves being cowed in Beijing? What if the extreme economic interdependence between the United States and China is not actually carrying our values into a backward and benighted realm, but accomplishing precisely the opposite — granting the Chinese Politburo ever-increasing leverage over America’s economic and political life?
The difference in China, he says, is that employees were angling less to serve their own interests than those of hidden masters. “We realized that the loyalties of many of our employees were entirely
split. Even if they had the best of intentions, even if they really wanted to drag China into a more open and democratic era, they were still under immense personal pressure to serve the state.”’
This is also true of ethnic Chinese employees of companies in the United States – even those who were born there.
November 21, 2015
THOUGH I was a child in the famous 1960s, the anti-materialistic spirit of the cultural revolution was very much alive by the time I got to college in the 70s. It was unthinkable then for us to have televisions in our dorm rooms. Television was The Man. It was manipulation and advertising, the selling of a life based on comfort and things. We wanted none of that. We went to art museums and protests. We drank herbal tea and dreamed of lives that would not lead to the suburbs.
Lacking in humility and other important things, we did not realize we were really tools of the system. Our belief in sexual freedom was incompatible with our rejection of consumerism and Capitalism. Sexual freedom would turn out to be one of the greatest enablers of money oppression the world has ever known.
But now all that is clear. When Barbie, that icon of the establishment and enemy of enlightened feminists everywhere, is championed by the political left, as Barbie was championed this week when the sick and slick fashion designer Jeremy Scott released his commercial of Barbie in black leather, we can see that the anti-Capitalistic spirit of those times has indeed disappeared. The black leather Barbie was hailed as a sign of progress by leftists ( Barbie of all things!) because a boy in the commercial is clearly presented as a budding homosexual. Cultural conservatives played along with the deliberately manufactured conflict. Many expressed their distress at how their children were being exposed to perversion. Of course, that is true.
But there is a more fundamental critique of Barbie that hails back to the Age of the Hippies. In search of that critique one must ask, for one, why are toy companies such giant monopolies? Why do they possess such wealth and influence that they are actually able to produce such attention-getting stunts and shape our children’s lives? Why do they so arrogantly defy the sensibility of the people? Why do they support homosexuality at all? Why could they care less what you think? Why do children have so many things and so little simplicity and community? The answers will be found in our economic system.
Big money is dangerous when it holds no allegiance to the moral law. That is a truth the Hippies sort of knew. Unfortunately, their solutions to the problem of monopoly and materialism were Marxist. And they got lost on the way to a better economy through the Sexual Revolution. They got unlimited sex in exchange for selling out. They got fornication, abortion, homosexuality, divorce, adultery, contraceptives and feminism, all of which made them so distracted and created such personal chaos they no longer cared that the world was increasingly dominated by money and intense competition, all of which made them succumb to compound interest, careerism, monopolies, mass advertising, skyrocketing national debt, high taxes, erased borders, globalist rule and politicians who are clearly bought. They got unlimited sex and money slavery.
“Much to the delight and amazement of the capitalist elites, the Free Market is the only thing left after everything else has been deconstructed,” E. Michael Jones recently wrote. [September issue, Culture Wars magazine.]
Everything has been deconstructed. Even little boys.
Everything has been deconstructed except debt.
The artificial world of Barbie and her handlers, who have hearts of stone and haven’t the slightest love or compassion for children, is symbolic of all that is left. Read More »
November 21, 2015
SERENA SHIM, a 29-year-old American journalist, received death threats shortly after she reported that Turkey was sending arms to ISIS with United Nations World Food Program trucks. Her car was hit head on by a cement truck on Oct. 19, 2014. The Obama administration has allegedly refused to investigate her death.
November 20, 2015
MARK JAWS writes:
Ten years ago I would have thought that Syrian girl was one of those conspiracy-mongers and a Jew hater to boot. After all, she is Syrian, and I am Jewish, and we Jews come as easily to that general conclusion as matzuh balls are drawn to chicken soup.
Then I started listening to Ron Paul and my curiosity was piqued by his calls to audit the Federal Reserve Banking system. “Audit the Fed?” I thought. “Why? That is the nation’s bank!” But thanks to Youtube I learned that the Fed is not the nation’s bank after all, but rather a private consortium of banks run strictly for profit. Read More »
November 20, 2015
IT’S interesting how many wars have been waged against countries that were not under the control of the central banking cartel. Brandon Turbeville looks at recent history in this 2012 piece.
Syria is an obvious target for international financial interests. The blogger Syrian Girl writes:
Syria’s Central Bank is state-owned & controlled – In other words, it manages its national currency so that it serves the Syrian people and not the Rothschild-controlled global bankers operating from their New York, London, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, Basel and Paris hideouts.
This means that the volume of currency it issues is in proper sync with the true needs of real economy of work, labor, production and all that is useful to Syria’s people, instead of being in sync with parasitic, usurious, speculative foreign financiers. The latter seek to control local central banks so they can artificially limit the volume of currency available for genuine economic needs, especially the no-interest credit needed to finance useful things in the real economy: power plants, roads, gas works, housing, private enterprise and initiatives. This forces productive players – public and private – to have to resort to deadly interest and usury-based private banking loans whereupon the eternal debt chain starts to grow and grow as the so-called ‘sovereign debt crises’ that hit country after country throughout decades of time eloquently show.
By artificially distorting the volume of ‘public currency’ issued by sovereign central banks that generates no interest, countries are thus forced to resort to high interest bearing ‘private currency’ (loans) handled by the monopolistic private bankster cabal in the hands of Rothschild, Rockefeller, Warburg, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, CitiCorp, JP Morgan Chase interests.
Clearly, a very good reason for these parasitic banksters to want to take out Syria.
November 20, 2015
PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS writes:
If it is up to Western politicians, the world is doomed for sure. To the man and the woman they are warmongers. Moreover, the response to the false flag/hoax attack is mindless. The morons declare that the West is attacked because it allows women to be educated. The West is attacked because of “french values and French way of life, because we dance” (Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius). In other words, the nonsense that worked for the idiot US president, George W. Bush, works for the French. “We are attacked because we are good.” All of us good people here in the West would never be attacked because we have looted and robbed the Middle East for a century and followed up the looting with 14 years of military devastation of seven countries, producing millions of deaths and displaced persons.
Really, it is a wonder that there are not round the clock REAL TERRORIST ATTACKS on Western countries, who certainly deserve them. [Update: Roberts goes over Read More »
November 20, 2015
JON RAPPOPORT writes that every television newscast is stagecraft. This is an obvious point, but it is amazing how the average viewer denies it and participates in what is fake:
Focus on the network evening news. This is where the staging is done well.
First, we have the image itself, the colors in foreground and background, the blend of restful and charged hues. The anchor and his/her smooth style.
Then we have the shifting of venue from the studio to reporters in the field, demonstrating the reach of coverage: the planet. As if this equals authenticity.
Actually, those reporters in the field rarely dig up information on location. A correspondent standing on a rooftop in Cairo could just as well be positioned in a bathroom in a Las Vegas McDonald’s. His report would be identical. Read More »
November 19, 2015
Thomas More, sketch by Jean Schoevaert-Brossault. Courtesy of Moreanum, Angers, France.
ED writes:
I recently came across this prayer written by St. Thomas More when he was a prisoner in the Tower of London:
Give me the grace, Good Lord
To set the world at naught. To set the mind firmly on You and not to hang upon the words of men’s mouths.
To be content to be solitary. Not to long for worldly pleasures. Little by little utterly to cast off the world and rid my mind of all its business. Read More »
November 19, 2015
ALAN writes:
Last August I wrote about an old Protestant church building in south St. Louis that was no longer a church but was being used as a pizza restaurant. (“Communities in Memory Alone”, The Thinking Housewife, Aug. 5)
Recently St. Louis police closed the building and placed signs on it reading “Danger – Condemned – Keep Out.” But the problem was not in the building; it was in some of the people in the building, who are suspected of trafficking in girls. [More here.] Read More »
November 19, 2015
THE transparently phony Fox News personality, Geraldo Rivera, is shown here reunited with his daughter, Simone, earlier this week in Paris. Simone just happened to have been in the Stade de France for a football match when suicide bombers attacked it last Friday. (Her acting debut!!)
From the very first moments after the attack, Rivera, who is Jewish, was publicly advocating war in the Middle East and he continued to do so in Paris:
“We need to respond by declaring war on them… if we don’t kill them, they’re going to kill us.”
He offered specifics, calling for Russia, the U.S. and our Middle East Allies to join forces in a war against ISIS– even if have to drag the latter in “kicking and screaming.”
“I want a massive ground campaign to conquer ISIS once and for all,” Rivera said.
For now, he gets to hug his daughter again; a small, but maybe bigger victory for the news veteran.
