OH! uncertain and distrustful soul. God be with you in those not disloyal misgivings, which ailment of body or turn of mind seem to make in your case inevitable. The mystery of Creation is the fountain of your pains. As it has been your poison, so take it as your remedy. Meditate long, meditate humbly, on what it is to have a Creator, and comfort will come at last. If broad daylight should never be yours on this side of the grave, He will hold your feet in the twilight that they shall not stumble, and at last with all the more love, and all the more speed as well, He will fold you to His bosom who is Himself the light eternal.

 — Fr. Frederick William Faber, D.D., The Creator and the Creature 

ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:

The New York Post reports:

Santa Claus is banned. The Pledge of Allegiance is no longer recited. “Harvest festival” has replaced Thanksgiving, and “winter celebrations” substitute for Christmas parties.

New principal Eujin Jaela Kim has given PS 169 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a politically correct scrub-down, to the dismay of teachers and parents.

“We definitely can’t say Christmas, nothing with Christmas on it, nothing with Santa,” PTA president Mimi Ferrer said administrators told her. “No angels. We can’t even have a star because it can represent a religious system, like the Star of David.”

[…]

Ninety-five percent of the 1,600 kids at PS 169 are Asian or Hispanic.

ELLEN BROWN, author of The Web of Debt, writes:

Global developments in finance and geopolitics are prompting a rethinking of the structure of banking and of the nature of money itself. Among other interesting news items:

In Russia, vulnerability to Western sanctions has led to proposals for a banking system that is not only independent of the West but is based on different design principles.

In Iceland, the booms and busts culminating in the banking crisis of 2008-09 have prompted lawmakers to consider a plan to remove the power to create money from private banks.

In Ireland, Iceland and the UK, a recession-induced shortage of local credit has prompted proposals for a system of public interest banks on the model of the Sparkassen of Germany.

In Ecuador, the central bank is responding to a shortage of US dollars (the official Ecuadorian currency) by issuing digital dollars through accounts to which everyone has access, effectively making it a bank of the people. [cont.]

Read More »

THIS is from “Global Agenda.” (Note: There is a mistake at the end. It should read Vicki Gardner, not Alison Gardner.) Read More »

FRANK REGA writes in response to the discussion of smiles:

Fr. Michael J. McGivney of Connecticut died in 1890 at the youthful age of only 38. Yet he still managed to found the Knights of Columbus, especially to give Catholic men an alternative to joining groups like the Masons, and also to provide insurance opportunities for the mainly Irish day laborers. He had no time for wimpy grins and Vatican II happy faces – all known photos of him show him like this.

Read More »

EYE OF THE TIBER writes (in jest) that the climate change light show at St. Peter’s Basilica was just the beginning:

An illuminated projection of the Microsoft Office Bubbles theme onto the facade of St. Peter’s on Tuesday evening drew large crowds as the new basilica screen saver appeared, notifying the faithful that the basilica had not been in use for 10 minutes.

The decision to use the new screensaver was made by Senior Vatican Security official Claudio Aquila who said that it was the Vatican’s duty to protect St. Peter’s from terrorists attempting to infiltrate the basilica.

“We can no longer trust that simple security measure such as more guards will keep the basilica safe,” Aquila told EOTT this morning. “Now, even if a terrorist somehow gets through security, they will not be able to enter the church without first entering a password.”

WITH its latest anti-Catholic document, the Vatican II Robber Church reinforces its standing as the world’s largest branch of the Synagogue.

Read More »

Portrait of a Venetian Gentleman; Giorgio da Castelfranco, 1510

TIM writes:

Based on your posting today, and wishing to be as counter cultural as possible, I will no longer smile.

BARBARA WELLS SARUDY writes of the oral history memoir of Edward O’Neill, who grew up in the 1850s-60s in Brookfield, Massachusetts. This memoir speaks of a world so different from what is experienced by most American children today, surfeited as they are with gadgetry and toys while denied the uplifting mystique of Christmas (the “Christ Mass”) and many other good things, such as siblings, free time and family stability. Edward O’Neill lived in a better time:

“The first Christmas I remember was when I was four years old. The reason I remember it was because my mother gave me a big lump of brown sugar with a few drops of peppermint on it. I nibbled at that sugar a little bit at a time all day long and I can taste that peppermint to this day. You see, we were sort of pioneer people and we didn’t have much – nor not much to get anything with. Every winter in my early days was hard times.

“The only other present my mother had to give that Christmas was a quarter of a dried orange peel and she give it to my sister to put in her bureau drawer to make her clothes smell sweet. My father didn’t know much about Christmas. He’d been brought up by the Indians. His parents had been killed by redskins and he lived with the Indians until he was nearly twenty. My mother’s parents were missionaries and of course she knew all about Christmas. Read More »

IN CHINA, fake goods are often investigated by fake investigators. From the Associated Press:

One of the world’s largest consumer goods companies hired an investigator to track down counterfeit anti-dandruff shampoo. But instead of finding real counterfeiters, the investigator, Wang Yunming, set up a factory to produce counterfeit shampoo himself, which he then “seized” and billed to the firm as a successful raid, according to two employees involved in the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

It wasn’t the first such factory Wang founded. It was the fourth.

RESEARCHERS at the University of California, Berkeley, and Brown, have conducted an extremely important study. They have analyzed over 37,000 senior yearbooks from 1905 to 2013, carefully measuring the depth of smiles in yearbook portraits over time, The Washington Post reports. They did all this to find out what we, at this obscure website, found out a long time ago, without any grants or employing anyone: People smile much more than they once did. The smile, in fact, is mandatory.

“[H]appiness has replaced seriousness as the default emotion for photography, and for portraiture in general,” Jeff Guo writes.

Today, we mock portraits that look too intense or self-serious or vain. It’s hard to imagine that a century ago, what many people found ridiculous was the smile.

And:

“In the fine arts a grin was only characteristic of peasants, drunkards, children, and halfwits, suggesting low class or some other deficiency,” [Historian Christina] Kotchemidova writes, citing research from historian Fred Schroeder.

Shallowness has been often blamed here, but a dentist speculated that the rise of the smile was due to advances in his field. Why did George Washington look so serious? He had bad teeth. Another reader, Jeff W., said socialism leads to all smiles all the time. He wrote: Read More »

FROM HenryMakow.com:

All off the intelligence agencies and secret services, to include first and foremost the aforementioned “nexus of the CIA, MI6, DGSE and MOSSAD”, have a common home in Switzerland. Switzerland is not only the most protected banking capital in the world as demonstrated by its unique neutrality status during WWII, as well as home to the highly secretive BSI (Bank for International Settlements), it is also the true home of the headquarters of the CIA (aka The Company). Read More »

FROM the Introit for the Mass of the Third Sunday in Advent (Philippians iv 4-6):

Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say, rejoice. Let your modesty be known to all men: for the Lord is nigh. Be nothing solicitous: but in everything by prayer let your petitions be known to God. Ps. Lord thou hast blessed Thy land: Thou has turned away the captivity of Jacob. v. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

IN 1985, Yuri Bezmenov, Soviet KGB agent and journalist who had defected to the West in disgust at the Soviets’ efforts to destabilize other nations, gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin of the John Birch Society about KGB activity in the United States. If you have not seen this interview before, you are in for an eye-opener with this 13-minute clip. (The full interview can be seen here.)

Bezmenov said that most of the Soviet intelligence agency’s activities involved disinformation and propaganda, not espionage. The goal was “demoralization.” So successful had these efforts been since the 1960s that America was already an occupied nation, he said, and it was only a matter of time before its destruction was complete.

The Marxist-Leninist program he described is that of the Judaic organized crime syndicate that now runs America and is bringing us closer every day to catastrophic war and the American version of the Red Terror.

Notice what Bezmenov said about those idealists and “half-baked intellectuals” who supported the program. They will be lined up against a wall someday, he said, and shot. “Feminists are useful idiots, and are doomed.”

Eloi, from Classics Illustrated’s version of The Time Machine

ALAN writes:

“America is an Occupied Nation”, a recent item asserted.

That is true.  But how could it be otherwise?  On what grounds could a nation of Eloi lay claim to a better fate?

Americans’ enemies’ plans to make America over into a Socialist Republic have been known for more than a hundred years.  The Fabians declared their goals openly, and so did the Communists in years long before anyone reading these words was born.  They told the truth about their plans.  But most Americans paid no attention to them.

Making America into an Occupied Nation likely proved far easier for them than they may have imagined.

When Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee warned Americans about powerful Jews and war agitators wanting to drag Americans into World War II, they were promptly demonized by the Communist-friendly FDR.

When Senators McCarran and McCarthy said that Communists were entrenched in the federal government, they were promptly demonized by the mass communications industry. Read More »

FOUR people who were allegedly at the scene of the San Bernardino shootings last week told mainstream news reporters in the immediate aftermath of the shootings that what they saw was very different from the widely reported scenario. These interviews are not being widely broadcast or pursued by the mainstream outlets. Two people said they saw white military-style commandos with guns, not the dark-skinned Syed Farook and his petite, 90-pound wife. See the interview with the witness, Juan Hernandez, here. Scott Creighton reported on another witness:

CBS News did an interview with a witness, Sally Abdelmageed, via the phone right after the attack. What she described was:

“[T]hree men, dressed in all black, military attire with vests on holding assault rifles and one of them opened up the door to building three… and he… opens up the door to building three and … he… starts to spray, shoot all over into the room… I couldn’t see a face, he had a black hat on (mask) and uh, from my view all I could see was a black hat (mask) and long sleeve shirt… black cargo pants with zippers on the sides, big puffy pockets, he had a huge assault rifle and extra ammo… I just saw three dressed exactly the same…. their skin tone looked white. They looked like they were athletic build. They appeared to be tall…”

The men Hernandez and Abdelmageed saw may have looked like these military mercenaries allegedly seen fleeing the scene of the Boston Marathon bombing.

A third eyewitness in San Bernardino said he saw what seemed to be one of the gunmen in a car fleeing the scene and he was white.  Read More »

“POPE” Francis and his counterfeit church in Rome deserve credit for doing everything humanly possible to let the world know they are not Catholic. The latest is a “climate change” light show on the exterior walls of St. Peter’s Basilica today. This hideous spectacle, during the second week of Advent and on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, brought cheesy totalitarian art to a new level. It was called “Fiat Lux: Illuminating Our Common Home” and was put together by the UN-affiliated World Bank Group, Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Inc., the Li Ka Shing Foundation, Obscura, and Okeanos. What do any of these outfits have to do with the Catholic Church? Nothing. The whole thing reeks of globalist corporate branding. These are the same people responsible for an equally ugly light show on the Empire State Building this summer that featured endangered animals and the Hindu goddess Kali (below).

It’s a lot easier to care about cute animals and bad weather than about temptation, sin and spiritual combat. But ultimately this isn’t about the extinction of snow leopards and whales. It’s about power — not for the Church, but for the consortium of banks and global government agencies that will come to the rescue in the alleged climate crisis. “Pope” Francis, with the publication of his environmentalist encyclical letter Laudato Si, has been busy creating the religious branch of the UN and this is his artistic statement, ugliness being one of the signature characteristics of the Vatican II Church. Be assured, however, that lots of people are going to rave about it. There’s no accounting for taste. It’s one of the first things to go when truth doesn’t matter.

[Update: Lifesite News reports on criticism of the show and has background on the sponsors.]

I WAS fortunate enough to hear a university choir perform Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff’s wonderful Bògòroditse Devo yesterday and since today is the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I thought you might enjoy it. It is based on the Hail Mary and is from the composer’s vespers. An English translation of the Russian lyrics:

Rejoice, O mother of God.
Virgin Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee;
blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
for thou hast borne the Saviour of our souls. Read More »