KARL D. writes:

From the files of arrested development among the young “adult” American male. You may not be aware of it, but a growing number of men in their 20s and well into their 30s are collecting toys, specifically, action figures and comic books from Sci-Fi TV shows and movies — collections that can, and do, run into hundreds of these figures. There are entire online communities dedicated to this. (more…)

MICHAEL HOFFMAN reports on the case of Ursula Haverbeck, an 87-year-old German woman who has been sentenced to ten months in prison for stating that inmates of Aushcwitz were not killed in gas chambers. Haverbeck was fined thousands of dollars in 2009 for offending Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews.

Tens of thousands of Jews and others unquestionably suffered and died at Auschwitz. But Haverbeck maintains, as do other “revisionists,” that Auschwitz was a labor camp where most died from uncontrolled disease, rather than deliberate extermination in gas chambers. Zyklon B, the famous gas, was used to delouse the clothes of camp inmates to prevent typhus, which killed many thousands. Haverbeck’s opinions are consistent with the evidence. Even the famous “Nazi Hunter” Simon Wiesenthal stated that “there were no extermination camps on German soil.”

European courts do not punish people for challenging any other historical event. According to The Daily Mail:

During her defence she said that the Holocaust of six million Jews ‘was the greatest and longest lived lie in history.’

Judge Björn Jönsson struggled to maintain his temper with the elderly Nazi after she said she shouldn’t be punished for the crime again as she had already been fined twice and given a suspended sentence for previous Holocaust denials.

He said: ‘I do not have to prove the Holocaust to you, same as I do not have to prove that the earth is round.

‘It is futile to discuss facts with people like you. A thief who steals the same thing again and again is punished again and again.’

The prosecutor in the case stormed: ‘It is regrettable that a woman who is still so vivid in her old age wastes her energy trying to spread such a hair-raising bullshit.’ (more…)

THE media loves to incite hate fests, but the recent incident at the University of Missouri is probably one more example of juvenile, fabricated racial oppression. From The Federalist:

Something stinks at the University of Missouri. A reported incident of vandalism at Mizzou sparked university-wide protests, a boycott by the school’s 4-5 football team, and eventually the resignation of the university’s president and chancellor.

There’s only one problem: no evidence of the alleged incident, in which a poop swastika on the wall of a dormitory restroom was reported, has ever been made publicly available. (more…)

THE White Crucifixion by Marc Chagall is apparently the favorite painting of “Pope” Francis (it’s on the cover of one of his books). The blasphemous artwork is an interesting study in psychological warfare against the Church. Maurice Pinay writes:

What we’re looking at above in The White Crucifixion is a work of alchemy, and anyone who knows anything about Hasidic Judaism will know where I’m coming from with that observation. Quite simply, ‘Chagall’ has transmuted the ideological descendants of the Pharisees who had Jesus Christ executed into Christlike victims, while transmuting Jesus into an East European Hasid (by the striped prayer shawl and surrounding context).

There are subtexts surrounding this central theme:

… a mother hugs her child to her chest as she flees the destruction. Above her is a Torah scroll with white light streaming from it and a figure stepping over the light. This refers to a famous Hasidic tale, when a bishop ordered the Torah to be burnt. Rabbi Israel prayed and his prayers pierced to the palace of the Messiah. As a result the bishop fell into a fit, which frightened those who intended to burn the scrolls …

… a synagogue is being burnt by a Nazi brownshirt whilst behind Nazi flags can be seen … (Richard Harries, The Passion in Art, pp. 109-110)

(more…)

ANTI-GLOBALIST Expatriate writes: This kind of slavery found at a salt farm in South Korea happens all over Asia, not just in Thailand, Burma, and Malaysia. It involves the connivance of government officials, the police, and the military.

INTERESTING reflections by John C. Wright on the demise of rational atheism and the decline of thought: In my youth, it was possible for a man to believe in absolute truth without believing in God. All rational atheists so believe. In the modern climate, it is realized that the belief in absolute truth forces one eventually to recognize absolute standards in moral law, that is, a law unbound by time and space, and the existence of such standards logically imply a law-giver to whom one is morally bound to obey, but the only lawgiver unbound by time and space must be a supernatural one: a god. While it is a logically self-consistent philosophical position to hold, as I did, that moral law can be objective without a God to legislate it, one finds that the intellectual elite of the West cannot maintain that position: because the emotional reason why they wished to escape from God in the first place  was because they wished to escape the moral law. In order to promote and protect sin, even well educated men, once they lose the belief in God, soon find themselves unwilling, or perhaps unable, to articulate any rational reason defending the position. The habit of argumentation falls to one side. Schools no longer teach it, and men can get doctorates these days without ever once, not once, participating in an honest question and answer about any intellectual matter. The ability to entertain an…

IS the familiar conversational rule that one must "never talk politics or religion" the product of a conspiracy? Some reflections at a blog called The Liberty Bell.

  A READER from France sends his tribute to the much-maligned white male.

IT IS no dishonor to those who bravely fought in World War II to recall the arguments on this Veteran’s Day by those who were against American intervention in the war and who at one point represented the vast majority of Americans. Charles Lindbergh was one of the most vocal opponents of American involvement as part of the America First movement.

Here is the full text of his speech on the subject in Des Moines, Iowa on September 11, 1941. Some excerpts:

National polls showed that when England and France declared war on Germany, in 1939, less than 10 percent of our population favored a similar course for America. But there were various groups of people, here and abroad, whose interests and beliefs necessitated the involvement of the United States in the war. I shall point out some of these groups tonight, and outline their methods of procedure. In doing this, I must speak with the utmost frankness, for in order to counteract their efforts, we must know exactly who they are.

The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration.

Behind these groups, but of lesser importance, are a number of capitalists, Anglophiles, and intellectuals who believe that the future of mankind depends upon the domination of the British empire. Add to these the Communistic groups who were opposed to intervention until a few weeks ago, and I believe I have named the major war agitators in this country.

I am speaking here only of war agitators, not of those sincere but misguided men and women who, confused by misinformation and frightened by propaganda, follow the lead of the war agitators. (more…)

SEBASTIAN C. writes:

I was an acquaintance of the late Lawrence Auster here in New York.  Notwithstanding my many contributions to his extraordinary website, Larry eventually banished me because of our irreconcilable differences over 9/11, an event I lived through first-hand at and around 180 Maiden Lane.  I was one of those people covered in white soot, and became a “truther” by the end of the day after seeing the second airplane from my office window, the strange demolition, learning that WTC 7 had been “pulled” (and reported as destroyed prior to its demolition), that Cheney had assumed command of Norad, and that the Pentagon had been hit by…something…anyway.  Poor Larry told me he “refused to believe his government would…”  I am delighted your website has continued.  But I am writing about something possibly worse than 9/11, which was, after all, a one-time event.

Here is a video by the very influential Economist magazine.  It features a depressed and confused 24-year-old “tomboy” girl in Belgium who had decided to avail herself of her country’s assisted suicide laws.  The 20-minute documentary is an overt promotion of suicide, in this case state-administered death for a girl with no physical ailments.  That’s right: this is not a cancer or Leukemia patient but simply a girl who’s depressed.  The state has concluded she will not improve (she’s 24!), and gave her the green light to die.  On Death Day (5:00 p.m. sharp), just before the state’s doctor could inject her, she suddenly felt better and decided to go on living, sort of.  The report’s thesis is succinctly stated near the end:  the availability of state-administered suicide helps many patients by letting them know there is a way out.  Those opposing state-administered death are cruel and inhuman.  Suicide for depression is a Human Right.  (That she could have jumped off a ledge of her own accord is never mentioned in the video).

One could fill a book on this with Bertonneauesque comments on the Sickness Onto Death of the West, but really, the thing speaks for itself.  Remember that The Economist is an enthusiastic promoter of mass Muslim migration into Europe and “gay rights in Latin America.”  Of course they would be. They know what they’re doing.

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ONE of "Pope" Francis's favorite pastimes is to insult Catholics. Now the Pope Francis Insult Generator instantly produces some of his favorite slurs for Catholics and others. At a loss for words? Strike the fatal blow by calling your enemies "uniformists, alternativists and advantagists" or  "querulous and disillusioned pessimists!"

ERIC writes:

There have been a spate of black protests at universities recently. I am struck by the insolence of the protesters and the trivial nature of their grievances.

At Yale, an administrator wrote a memo coaching members of the community to avoid wearing Halloween costumes that might give offense. A female faculty member piped up by email to say that perhaps the university should not be an arbiter of taste (or something to that effect). This brought scorn upon her head, at which point her husband (also on the faculty) stepped in to verbally defend her.

The outcome was this. The arrogance of this woman is breathtaking. What right has she to charge him with discourtesy?

At Missouri, the student body president, a black man who was elected by his fellow students, claimed that he was the target of a drunk yelling racial slurs, and that such has happened to him on campus on other occasions. Additionally, on two occasions a few weeks apart, a swastika was found painted in feces on the wall of a dormitory bathroom in the early morning hours. When a group of protesters tried to confront the University President by blocking his limousine at a parade, he refused to leave his car and kept driving.  (more…)

FROM The New York Times: Weeks of simmering racial tension at Yale University boiled over in recent days into a debate over whether the administration was sensitive enough to concerns about Halloween costumes seen as culturally offensive, students and adminstrators said. Peter Salovey, the president of Yale, said he had been left “deeply troubled” by a meeting he held with students of color last week who were “in great distress.” Many said they did not believe the university was attuned to the needs of minority students. “The experiences they shared went beyond the incidents of the last few days,” he said in a statement. “Their concerns and cries for help made clear that some students find life on our campus profoundly difficult."

ERIC writes:

File this under ‘Things That Did Not Need To Be Invented’. I think we can foresee the outcome of this. It won’t be pretty.

The Housewife has been largely silent on the pressing issue of tattoos, particularly of women. She would not happen to be a painted lady herself, would she?

Just askin.’ (more…)

A young man who lived in a 400-square-foot studio apartment in San Francisco with his wife and two young children comes away from the experience with valuable insights. He and his wife decided that they would forego two incomes and live in a studio apartment for a few years. Many of the lessons they learned are reminiscent of previous discussions here about life in small spaces. For example, tight private space induces people to rely more on public spaces, such as parks, cafes and libraries. (It probably can be proven that public space declines in some ways to the extent that private square footage increases.) Also, tight space forces one to think carefully about possessions and do away with excess. Greg Kroleski also perceptively analyzes the options for redesigning storage and living space.

He and his wife found that as a one-income family they had a harder time qualifying for available apartments.

My wife and I were 27 when our first son was born. Significantly younger than the median San Francisco birthing age of 33. We also made a decision to have my wife stay at home with the children.

Neither of those things are strange for a family in the United States during the last century. But both of those are strange for a San Franciscan in 2015. (more…)

ROSS DOUTHAT of The New York Times deserves credit for trying to explain Catholic doctrine to a group of arrogant pseudo-theologians. What is that real position? That almost anything Catholic can change when the times require it, and “developing” doctrine just means keeping up with capital-H History, no matter how much of the New Testament is left behind. As I noted earlier, the columnist’s task is to be provocative. So I must tell you, openly and not subtly, that this view sounds like heresy by any reasonable definition of the term.

“Boobus Americanus 1: I read a most fascinating column by George Will today in which he draws disturbing parallels between the irrational anti-Semitism of Hitler’s Germany and that of modern day Iran.

“Boobus Americanus 2: George Will is a rare case of a thoughtful conservative. He is one of the most intelligent contemporary American thinkers.”

EXCEPT for the first paragraph, which facetiously refers to Hitler as the “Great One,” this is an awesome smack-down of the columnist George Will by the writer Mike King. (more…)