READ about it at Tradition in Action.

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  The ancient Ninevites, Jews and, later, Christians wore sackcloth as an expression of self-mortification and repentance. The Pope in former times blessed the sackcloth of penitents guilty of grave sins at the beginning of Lent (today is Ash Wednesday). Cool people today wear athletic gear when they engage in great feats of self-denial. They eat protein bars and drink vitamin water. Fasts last all year long. Sackcloth is expensive. The desire to repent cannot be eradicated from human nature. Sin is universal. "Remember, man, thou art dust."

ADAM writes from Arizona:

Inquiring minds want to know: what happened to Renner after his house burned down? Did Renner die in the fire? Or did he live to face an arson charge? What a cliffhanger of an ending to the story!

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   ROBERT Tracinski at The Federalist perceptively argues that college rape hysteria (as distinguished from the real, but uncommon phenomenon of college rape) is caused by "an attempt to create a scapegoat for the emotional dark side of promiscuity." It’s a system which systematically preys on and exploits the emotional vulnerability of young women in order to use them as publicity fodder for an ideological agenda.

A MOTHER writes from New Mexico:

I am Catholic and I understand you don’t believe in the post-Vatican II church. Do you take your children to mass? Do they do CCD classes through a local parish? Should I attend these masses? Also I would like your advise on what you think of the Church’s rule of being open to life. I am 28 years old and have four children ages eight, four, two, and four months. I’m not sure I should have any more. I am constantly tired and don’t have family nearby to help. I would appreciate your thoughts. Thank you.

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  IN A 2014 article on Mardi Gras traditions, Charles A. Coulombe wrote: Our ancestors celebrated [Mardi Gras] to the best of their ability because they kept Lent very strictly: indeed, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the wise author of The Physiology of Taste, tells us what Lent was like in pre-Revolutionary France: No body breakfasted, and therefore all were more hungry than usual. All dined as well as possible, but fish and vegetables are soon gone through with. At five o’clock all were furiously hungry, looked at their watches and became enraged, though they were securing their soul’s salvation. At eight o’clock they had not a good supper, but a collation, a word derived from cloister, because at the end of the day the monks used to assemble to comment on the works of the fathers, after which they were allowed a glass of wine. Neither butter, eggs, nor any thing animal was served at these collations. They had to be satisfied with salads, confitures, and whitemeats, a very unsatisfactory food to such appetites at that time. They went to bed, however, and lived in hope as long as the fast lasted. I hope you are planning to enjoy some of your favorite things today, dear reader, (perhaps a triple-stuffed-crust pizza hubcap with extra latex) and then say goodbye to all that until Easter. I personally think that giving up industrial-grade pizza does not count as a form of penance. In fact, I think…

HANNAH writes:

I have read your website for some months. I differ with you on several issues but that’s not important now. I agree wholeheartedly on the subject of race, and black criminality in particular and I would like to tell you about something that happened the other day which illustrates this.

I don’t want to go into a long-winded bio, so, in brief: I was raised a liberal. I learned the hard way how to deal with blacks. I will provide anecdotes in future, if you want, but here’s an example from today.

I live in Brooklyn now. And I’ve noticed that any neighborhood except black ones is mixed – because that’s the way it goes in modern urban America. Blacks go where ever they please. Whites and Asians stay out of black neighborhoods. (more…)

ALAN writes:

If the FBI Director wants “to learn from our mistakes,” a good place to begin is with his statement that the FBI’s wiretap of Michael “Martin Luther” King was “without fact or substance, and is predicated on the naked assertion that there is “communist influence in the racial situation.”

His statement and implication are utter nonsense.  J. Edgar Hoover said King was the most notorious liar in the country.  He and the Kennedy brothers knew that King surrounded himself with his Communist friends and “advisers.” There is good reason to believe that King was a Communist-trained agitator.  The Communists were involved up to their ears in the “Civil Rights Revolution” of the 1950s-‘60s. It is a sad state of affairs indeed when Mr. Hoover’s successor either does not know or does not want to know or does not want to acknowledge these facts. (more…)

PAUL writes from Louisiana:

I finally watched The Help a few weeks ago.  It is a 2011 movie about the supposed life of black maids in Jackson, Mississippi in the early 60s. It was wonderfully acted, cast, and directed. But was it accurate? It was fiction. The author is much too young to have witnessed the events.  Maybe she interviewed some maids, or maybe she did not.

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FROM the unpublished writings of Lawrence Auster:

Deep in the American mind there is the ideal of America as a country where advancement is open to anyone, where “it doesn’t matter who your parents were.” The problem with this lovely-sounding ideal of race-blindness is that it can only work within reasonable limits, i.e., when it is applied to groups and persons who, notwithstanding some mutual differences, share a civilizational commonality. Taken literally, it becomes absurd and dangerous. Applied en masse to radically diverse populations and cultures, the ideal of race-neutrality turns out to be not race-neutral at all, but becomes a weapon used by some groups to dispossess others.

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FBI Director James Comey, in a speech at Georgetown in reaction to the Ferguson riots, indulges in transparent historical revisionism to excuse crimes by blacks. There is nothing original in his speech, in which he ridiculously claims that black crime is no worse than the former crimes of Irish immigrants. It’s all been said millions and millions of times, including the idea that white racism is a “hard truth.” It’s all taught every single day in high schools and colleges. Still it is noteworthy when a chief law enforcer denies the very notion of free will in law-breaking.

Do you see the logic here? If lawbreakers are not responsible for their own behavior, or at least some of them are not responsible for their own behavior, then the government is responsible for everything. Comey’s speech is just another bureaucrat’s plea for bureaucratic tyranny. That’s what racialism is about. It’s about power, not benevolence towards blacks. Comey could care less about the true welfare of blacks, who are destroyed by this country’s leniency towards crime and the fatuous insensitivity of people like Comey towards its victims. Instead, Comey demands that his underlings worship at the grave of Martin Luther King:

I am descended from Irish immigrants. A century ago, the Irish knew well how American society—and law enforcement—viewed them: as drunks, ruffians, and criminals. Law enforcement’s biased view of the Irish lives on in the nickname we still use for the vehicles we use to transport groups of prisoners. It is, after all, the “paddy wagon.” 
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THE POET and essayist Mark Anthony Signorelli examines the idea that art, particularly high culture, is not an elevating influence on human nature because some individuals who have committed great moral crimes have been either cultured people or actual artists,. He cites the example of Nazi officers who listened to Mozart.

It appears very likely to be the case that the corrosive politics of the era simply exerted such a fierce influence over that generation, that no amount of erudition or aesthetic refinement could consistently counteract it. (more…)