RACHEL C. writes from Anchorage, Alaska:

I want you to know how enriching your website is to me. I have been a reader for a few years. It brings me comfort that I and my family are not the only ones who, in thinking things through, can consider the devastating outcomes of the moral and social insanity happening in this day and age. We are on a downward spiral, but I trust that where there are tares, there is also wheat, like you. -:)

In response to The Unisex Gnome, you are right on! I have noticed the majority of older people that I can’t tell “what” they are, but in the rare occasion that I notice a feminine older lady, my heart smiles so big! I feel a connection with a woman who has gone before me, I feel inspired and hopeful. I often remind our daughters (11, 9, and 7) that when I am old “no matter what put my lipstick on.” They know what that means… that I still want to look like a woman! (We also have two sons, 17 and 14, but I don’t want them anywhere near me with lipstick, lol!)

Five years ago, I was at Costco with my husband, wearing a plaid dress (Christmas colors). I have always preferred skirts and dresses, even when I was growing up. Never trying to make a statement or anything, just enjoy them. -:) Anyways I was in the frozen foods section, when this middle-aged man from across the way parked his grocery cart, turned around to face me, approached me, and said, quite loudly, but friendly-like, “YOU are wearing a DRESS!” I was shocked, but I love a surprise, so I was softly laughing. He said “WOW! You are so refreshing! You made my whole holidays!” I’ve come to the summation that we dress, not for ourselves, but for society. It is a service to be clearly a woman, so as not to confuse anyone, and hopefully to brighten someone’s day.

I thank God that He created me a woman and, despite my 80’s and early 90’s upbringing in the Bay Area of California, I am not ashamed or embarrassed to be a woman. I don’t reject it on any level. I consider it a privilege and Christian responsibility. (more…)

UP until now, most women in advanced age maintained outward vestiges of femininity, belonging as they did to a culture that honored it. Though they might wear pants, detracting from the softness of their form, they would also wear light-colored, feminine blouses, have their hair done into puffy styles, and perhaps use lipstick. But these were women who did not grow up under the true Cult of Androgyny. These were women who took pride in their femininity and did not despise it, as feminists have taught us to despise ourselves.

Now the first women who were introduced into the Cult of Androgyny in youth or middle age are approaching the extremes of life. Yesterday, I saw a depressing sight.

She was a woman, probably in her eighties, slowly walking down the street with a cane. My first thought was that she was a tiny old man. Her hair was short and no-nonsense. She wore jeans and a dark green, zippered sweatshirt. There was nothing decorative about her. There was not a shred of anything useless. Feminine ornamentation brightens our surroundings and defies utilitarianism even on a very old woman. These clothes, normally ugly on a young person, look dramatically worse on an old person.  Old age alone removes many signs of the woman. Add unisex clothes to the mix, and the woman is gone. Femininity does not ultimately consist of clothes. The clothes express the person. So when we say the woman is gone, she is gone because she left her own essence. But clothes, in turn, affect the mentality and styles are imposed by a culture. What does a no-nonsense woman in very advanced age do with her no-nonsenseness?

There are going to be lots of Puritanical man-women like her soon. Perhaps they are truly in the American tradition, as the Puritans abhorred ornamentation too.

I wonder if these Puritanical, androgynous … What are they? We cannot call them ladies! But can we even call them women? How about persons? I wonder if these persons will be unhappy in some way they cannot pinpoint. After all, they have been robbed. They should feel cheated. A feminine older woman, in her delicacy and fragility, evokes warmth from others. One senses in her, maternal affection and tenderness, things of which the world never, ever, ever has enough. One senses her feminine dignity. A tiny, fragile gnome is interesting perhaps, but not attractive. Androgyny has cheated her of her essence.

We should love these elderly gnomes. After all, they are ours. Like all very old people, they do not have to have any usefulness or even be likable. Their purpose is to be and to sanctify us by eliciting our charity and protectiveness simply by their being and by their undeniable state of dependency. But their androgyny will rob us too. It will rob us of some of the reassuring landscape of age. (more…)

PAUL C. writes:

The Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, and The Wild Ones are examples of misplaced sympathy for white punks in the 1950s and early 1960s.  It is the same ideology that was later transferred to black punks and remains.  The idea is the punks don’t need discipline or deserve punishment, they need sympathy, understanding, and money from the establishment.

It is not their fault.  It is someone else’s fault.  The brief smile they put on Marlon Brando’s criminal face at the very end of The Wild Ones was supposed to be proof punks were sweethearts.  I wanted to punch Brando’s character yet again when I finally watched the stupid movie to the very end in the last year.  (I must have been very tired and lazy.) (more…)

THE canonization of Muhammad Ali in the press has left out some inconvenient facts. As Michael Hoffman puts it, “The Media’s Saint of the Diversity Religion was anything but…” Ali sometimes spoke refreshing common sense on race. He had the audacity to say, regarding the various races, “God made us different.” He said he loved his own race and everyone should love their own. However, after a trip to Africa, he said:

“Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.” (more…)

  FROM Positive Money: If someone told you that a mountain of personal debt could be cleared via 3 simple changes to the way that money and banking works, would you like to know how? Would you like to see a more stable economy, with more jobs, less personal and government debt? Would you like to see money created free of debt and going into the real economy and support businesses, instead of getting trapped in financial and property markets? This video explains how 3 simple changes to the way that money and banking works would make all this (and much more) possible.

FROM the photo blog of Kidist Asrat Paulos

  THE EUROPEAN elite have been playing with the occult for many years, a fact which has been particularly noticeable in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. But the most chilling and disturbing example is the recent opening ceremony for the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland. The longest and deepest train tunnel in the world, Gotthard traverses the Swiss Alps and cost 11 billion Euros to build. Nine miners died during its construction, which took 17 years. The opening ceremonies for this great feat of engineering, hailed as a force for European unification, were attended by some of the most powerful people in Europe, including Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Switzerland’s President Johann Schneider-Ammann, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel and France’s President Francois Hollande. Many thousands of spectators were also in attendance. With zombies, scarabs, human/goats, flying demons, embracing lesbians and almost-naked, pale-white walking corpses, the ceremonies were similar to a secret society ritual, but in full open display. Watching it, one almost expects a human sacrifice to be performed at any minute. The Gotthard ritual was split into 2 separate events, one for elite dignitaries inside the tunnel and the other outside in Erstfeld for the thousands of public attendees. Both were laced with graphic demonic symbolism, and broadcast live across the world through RT, BBC and other major European outlets. The indoor ceremony followed a similar, yet scaled down version, of the outdoor Erstfeld ritual, and was coordinated by German director…

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I recently took a five-day trip to California to attend a memorial service for my late mother.  Two of those days were spent in airports and on airplanes.  I flew United Airlines.  My destination was Santa Barbara, California, and I began my trip in Syracuse, New York.  There is no direct flight from Syracuse to Santa Barbara, so I necessarily made the trip by legs.  The longest leg on the way out was Chicago-to-Los Angeles and on the way back, San Francisco to Dulles.  United’s feeder-lines handled the shorter flights.  The two long flights were United Airlines flights. (more…)

IN the June issue of Culture Wars magazine, E. Michael Jones, author of Barren Metal: A History of Capitalism as the Conflict between Labor and Usury, to mention just one of his many outstanding books, writes about the Trump Phenomenon, as seen from his hometown of South Bend, Indiana.

It’s an essentially positive view of Trump’s economic nationalism. On Trump’s casino bankruptcies, for example, Jones states:

If Donald Trump had crammed down Goldman Sachs the way he crammed down the claims of the creditors to [Atlantic City’s] failed casinos, the world would be a better place, and the United States of America would have $4 trillion dollars to spend on something other than usury payments to the wealthy.

Later, he writes:

… [The] point which Trump is now making in his inchoate, broken clock way, is that there is an intimate connection between the economy and the nation. Both entities are created by closure. The purpose of the national economy is the well-being and prosperity of all of its citizens. Any talk of an international economy is merely oligarch subterfuge for exploiting labor differentials throughout the world.

In Indiana, in May of 2016, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders paid homage to these truths by framing the issues in essentially the same way. According to the South Bend Tribune:

Sanders delivered his standard stump speech Sunday, attacking Wall Street and the “big banks” and promising campaign finance reform, free public college tuition, Medicare for all, and an end to “bad” trade policies that cost “millions” of American jobs.

Like Trump, Sanders denounced the Carrier air conditioning corporation, which “recently announced plans to move 2,100 jobs from Indianapolis to Mexi-co, where he said, workers earn ‘$3 an hour.’”20 Sand-ers denounced Carrier’s parent company United Tech-nologies as “a company that made a profit of $7 bil-lion last year. It is a company that could afford to pay its CEO over $14 in total compensation. . . . . United Technologies gave its outgoing CEO in 2014 a (sever-ance package) worth over $172 million. . . .”21

Sanders attack on Carrier drew loud boos from the audience. With the Hoosiers firmly on his side, Sanders proceeded to ruin his own message by dragging in all the sexual issues which are de rigueur for Democrats but anathema to Hoosier voters, who invariably hand the state over to the Republicans because of their aversion to them: “Everyone here understands,” Bernie said, haranguing the crowd, “what they (the Republicans) mean by family values is no woman . . has a right to control her own body. We disagree. What they mean by family values is our gay brothers and sisters do not have the right to be married. We disagree.”22

If Bernie ruined his chances of carrying Indiana in a general election by bringing up the sexual issues, Trump ruined his message by arguing for building up America’s military. And what explains the similarities? Is it simply that great minds run in the same circles? No, it’s the 5,000 people on the other side of the room. It is Demos in Indiana. Demos is anti-free trade, pro-manufacturing, pro-high wages, anti-abortion, and anti-homosexual marriage, and there is currently no party which represents their views. Nor is it clear that Hoosiers are in a position to articulate what is going on when the CEO from Sales Force parachutes into Indianapolis and demands that the state legislature change its laws to meet the specifications of the homosexual/CEO cabal that is the avant garde of oligiarch proxy warfare in our day.

One day later, Demos had spoken. Trump crushed Cruz in a lopsided 60 to 30 percent victory, guaranteeing his lock on the nomination in Cleveland in July. Cruz surprised everyone by dropping out, thereby denying himself the nomination as the oligarch’s candidate at a brokered convention. (more…)

A READER writes:

As a woman, I find such clips an embarrassment. If women are so confident, strong, and intelligent then why do they need to be puffed up?

Imagine if men did such a sexist video. (more…)

IN Creator and Creature (1856), the Rev. Frederick Faber wrote:

… There is a hell already upon earth; there is something which is excommunicated from God’s smile. It is not altogether matter, not yet altogether spirit. It is not man only, nor Satan only, nor is it exactly sin. It is an infection, an inspiration, an atmosphere, a life, a coloring matter, a pageantry, a fashion, a taste, a witchery, an impersonal but a very recognisable system. None of these names suit it, and all of them suit it. Scripture calls it, “The World.” God’s mercy does not enter into it. All hope of its reconciliation with Him is absolutely and eternally precluded. Repentance is incompatible with its existence. The sovereignty of God has laid the ban of the empire upon it; and a holy horror ought to seize us when we think of it. Meanwhile its power over the human creation is terrific, its presence ubiquitous, its deceitfulness incredible. It can find a home under every heart beneath the poles, and it embraces with impartial affection both happiness and misery. It is wider than the catholic Church, and is masterful, lawless, and intrusive within it. It cannot be damned, because it is not a person, but it will perish in the general conflagration, and so its tyranny be over, and its place know it no more. We are living in it, breathing it, acting under its influences, being cheated by its appearances, and unwarily admitting its principles. Is it it not of the last importance to us that we should know something of this huge evil creature, this monstrous seabird of evil, which flaps its wings from pole to pole, and frightens the nations into obedience by its discordant cries? (more…)

"American cemeteries have developed creative ways to draw visitors, holding horror movie nights, concerts in mausoleums, fun runs and yoga classes in chapels. Cincinnati’s Spring Grove Cemeteries hosts bird walks, twilight tours, family fun nights, an annual dog day and designated times for Segway riders. In Bridgeport, Conn., people still stroll the pathways around the pond at Mountain Grove Cemetery to admire the flowering dogwood trees in the spring or the brilliant foliage in the fall." --- The New York Times, Jun. 7, 2016

ALAN writes:

The lawlessness depicted in the movie “Blackboard Jungle” (1955) did not exist in American public schools in the 1930s, nor in all-white schools or all-black schools in the 1940s, and the lawlessness that is found in public schools today did not exist in those schools in the 1960s.  The more power over schools that Americans have surrendered to their central government, the worse their schools have become.

Here is my chronology of 60 years of learned helplessness:

1956:  A five-month study of the effects of government-mandated racial integration in Washington, D.C. schools revealed “a marked increase in truancy, theft, vandalism, and sex offenses in integrated schools.  Dances and dramatic presentations have been quietly given up by most high schools.  [Note:  Spineless capitulation by those running the schools instead of militant enforcement of rules.]  Senior and junior class plays have been discontinued.  Inter-racial fights are frequent and constant vigilance is required to prevent molestation or attempted molestation of white girls by Negro boys or girls.  In contrast, the schools outside the integrated neighborhoods have no more such problems than they had four years ago.”

   [Sam M. Jones, “Caution: Integration at Work”, National Review, Oct. 6, 1956, p.10 ]

1959:  In her essay “Reflections on Little Rock”, Hannah Arendt wrote:

“Children are first of all part of family and home, and this means that they are, or should be, brought up in that atmosphere of idiosyncratic exclusiveness which alone makes a home a home, strong and secure enough to shield its young against the demands of the social and the responsibilities of the political realm.  The right of parents to bring up their children as they see fit is a right of privacy, belonging to home and family.  [Note: Belonging to individuals, not to any department of government or group of do-gooders.] (more…)

A PROTESTANT family has over the years sought to understand the vocation of farming:

Here is one small highlight from our study:

Genesis 3:23 “God sent him (Adam) forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.”

• The first occupation was farming.

• Farming is an occupation that is commissioned by God. It is essential for life. Therefore, it is important that as farmers we view our job as a very essential and important job. We must not merely have a focus on making money and increasing production, but rather have a focus on producing quality crops and food that will provide the nourishment for life and health that others need. (more…)

  FRANK REGA writes at The Shield of Faith: This is a poem I composed when I was able to see in perspective the summer of 1967 (THE Summer of '67), which I spent as a true drop-out in the East Village. As a former Yale graduate school student in Psychology, that summer I got to know, meet, and/or rub shoulders with Harvard drop-out Timothy Leary, artist Peter Max, Alan Ginsberg, Ed Sanders and Tuli of the Fugs, Abbie Hoffman, Nico of the Velvet Underground, Louis Abalofia - artist and "King of the Hippies," Paul Krassner, Lenny Horowitz - N.Y. Times art critic, Diahnne Abbot (before she married De Niro), poetess Anne Waldman, and many of the early and original spiritually-oriented hippies and anonymous drop-outs and Village denizens,  some of whom I met at the old Paradox Restaurant on E. 7th street - a popular macrobiotic eatery and gathering place. That summer the "flower child" movement had a distinctive Franciscan flavor, until it succumbed to the forces of hedonism and sunk into the abyss of Woodstock two years later. Ironically, it was a book called The Little Flowers of St. Francis that restored my Catholic faith, as the decade of the 70s began. This poem was inspired by my love for P. M. [cont.]

DON VINCENZO writes:

There was a time when the U.S. Military Academies were thought to have one – and only one – purpose: to send its graduates, grounded in a “warrior culture,” to aid and abet the security of this nation.  But that was then and now is now.

At the recent graduation of the midshipmen (I will not say or write, (“midshippersons”), the current Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, announced that two of the graduates, Keenan Reynolds and Joe Cardona, would be allowed to “defer their military service” in order to fulfill their dream: play professional football. The fact that these two men knew that, upon entering the academy, there was a five year commitment to serve in the Navy as the quid pro quo of having drawn a monthly wage, as well as having their room and board paid for by the U.S. taxpayer, would not now be applied; Secretary Carter said so. The ruling applied retroactively to Cardona, a 2015 graduate, who has “fulfilled” his service obligations by working once a week at a Navy prep school and the rest of the week for the Boston Patriot football team. Yes, today’s “warriors” come in all shapes and sizes. (more…)

WHEELER writes: As I write these words, I am looking at a vase full of this year's peonies, short-lived beauties that they are. They have passed their so-brief prime and are waiting with simplicity and patience to be reclaimed as dust. I find them more beautiful now than they were when nodding in my wife's garden, hostesses to battalions of ants. They are beautiful in the way that some old people are beautiful, with their knowing eyes hooded by a map of wrinkles and betrayals. I will let them sit here in their vase as long as I can before I take them outside and place them on the ground up in the woods. I cannot bear to put dead flowers in the trash. There is something melancholy about even the bare possibility that they might be even a tiny bit aware, and that they might be dejected at having to sit in reeking quiet in a plastic bag, among coffee grounds and Discover Card envelopes and potato peelings, looking with flower-hope for something merciful to occur, for a hole to appear in the bag and let in the catalyst of air, hoping for decomposition and a chance to touch holy dirt again.