The Entombment of Chris;  Sisto Badalocchio, 1610

HERE, on Wednesday of Passion Week, is a reflection by St. Thomas Aquinas on the Holy Sepulchre. The great saint and theologian sees the tomb of Christ as a symbol. It stands for the hiding away and burial in this world of the soul that approaches God. “Therefore it is that men, bright with a spotless interior life, should be buried in the sepulchre of divine contemplation.” “On Being Buried Spiritually” is found in the compilation Meditations for Lent from St. Thomas Aquinas, translated by Fr. Phillip Hughes:

HERE is a timely quote from Mgr. Fulton J. Sheen’s Communism and the Conscience of the West, published in 1948:

The Antichrist will not be so called; otherwise he would have no followers. He will not wear red tights, nor vomit sulphur, nor carry a trident nor wave an arrowed tail as Mephistopheles in Faust. This masquerade has helped the Devil convince men that he does not exist. When no man recognizes, the more power he exercises. God has defined Himself as “I am Who am,” and the Devil as “I am who am not.”

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ACCORDING to the Detroit woman who came to the aid of Steve Utash, the man beaten by a mob last week after an accident that may have been staged, 100 people were watching while Utash was being beaten and stomped — and she was the only one who protested.

Jorma Panula

IT’S always refreshing and inspiring when a male public figure has the courage or cluelessness to challenge feminist orthodoxy. Finnish conductor Jorma Panula recently said in public interview that women don’t make very good conductors. As we all know, that is tantamount to saying that women are not human beings. From WQXR:

Panula was asked in a Finnish television interview on March 30 whether he appreciated the fact that more women are entering the profession. “I do not!” he responded. “What the hell, it is such a limited profession. There are more than enough men. They can try, but it is completely different. Some of them are making faces, sweating and fussing, but it is not getting any better – only worse!”

The 83-year-old conductor added that women can try to be conductors provided that the music is “feminine.” For example, Stravinsky and Bruckner are not suitable for women; Debussy and Ravel are. “This is purely an issue of biology,” he reportedly said. Read More »

KARL D. writes:

This story as reported in the Daily Mail had me pulling my hair out. A young couple had to be rescued at sea by the U.S. Navy. This foolish, foolish couple decided to take a round-the-world trip on their sailboat with their one- and three-year-old children aboard. The one-year-old fell ill and they had lost communications and began taking on water when they made a satellite call for help. Read More »

In a perfect example of moral imbecility at work, the Healing Presence Singers recently performed on the streets of Philadelphia to advocate gun control in the wake of the murder of 26-year-old Amber Long, who was shot instantly by a purse snatcher.

ALAN writes:

The absence of moral outrage in response to murders like the one in Indianapolis is one example of the moral rot in today’s culture.  It is a result of hatred of responsibility: The responsibility to make moral judgments and act firmly on the basis of those judgments. Americans were once quite able and willing to do that, and The Law provided a proper moral and political framework for doing so. As Lawrence Auster wrote in 2006:

“Once upon a time, the press and the broadcast media represented the moral sense of the community and described vile murderers as vile murderers.”  [ “Evil Without Judgment”, View from the Right, Oct. 3, 2006 ] 

That is true.   The readiness to make those moral judgments and express them in plain language were the hallmarks of moral certitude.  But all of that is now gone.  What we have today in place of that moral certitude is moral imbecility.  It is reflected in how Americans think and speak, as when they say that a vicious crime is a “tragedy.”  Utter nonsense.   Read More »

BILL R. writes:

Here is another predictable Detroit illustration of the truth that no good deed goes unpunished. A child stepped in front of a passing pickup truck and the driver stopped to help him. The child’s leg was broken in the accident, but the man was viciously beaten and robbed by at least eleven men. He is in critical condition in the hospital.

Isn’t it amazing that in America all one needs to do in order to know the truth about race is to simply turn statements by government officials and MSM narratives into their precise opposite? Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said of this horrible crime, “This senseless vigilante style attack is not the essence of who we are as Detroiters and will not be tolerated.” Read More »

ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:

California State Sen. Leland Yee, of San Francisco, is yet another member of the Model Minority who does not fit the ideal. Yee was recently charged with trafficking in firearms while a public official. He is accused of “buying automatic firearms and shoulder-launched missiles from the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, an Islamist extremist group located in the southern Philippines and attempting to re-sell those weapons to an undercover FBI agent, as well as accepting a $10,000 bribe from an undercover agent in exchange for placing a call to the California Department of Public Health regarding a contract at the organization.”

It’s quite a disturbing story. From the Los Angeles Times:

In all, 26 people, including former school board president Keith Jackson, were indicted on charges related to an extensive crime ring headed by well-known Chinatown figure Raymond Chow, who was also arrested and charged Wednesday.

The indictment alleges Yee and Jackson defrauded “citizens of honest services” and were involved in a scheme to traffic firearms in exchange for thousands in campaign donations to the senator.

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SHEFALI writes from India:

This bit of news about a Sikh who is a professor at Columbia and who was attacked in Harlem found it’s way all the way here. This must be one of those rare articles where the race of the attackers escaped the liberal gag.

“They were walking past a group of 25 to 30 young men, many of whom had bikes, when he heard, “Get him!”

And:

“Singh tells BuzzFeed that he doesn’t remember much about the suspects — except that most were “African-American.”

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LOOK closely at the photos below of a small sampling of people who have been murdered, or are suspected of having been murdered, by black assailants. (One was not murdered. He was paralyzed from the neck down for life.) They were all but one attacked in “random” and “senseless” acts of violence by strangers.

Do you see anything remarkably similar — not a physical trait, but a quality of character — in all these faces? I don’t ask the question out of idle curiosity. I think the answer tells us something important about black psychology.

Nathan Trapuzzano

John Bannon died after he was knocked to the ground in Baton Rouge on Feb. 1.

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THE FRONT NATIONAL won historic gains in the French elections earlier this week, winning a total of eleven cities. The nationalistic, anti-European Union, anti-immigration party is widely identified with its leader, Marine Le Pen. “People want to live like French people in France, not like Saudis or Qatari,” Le Pen said at a campaign rally. There is no major political figure in the United States who could get ahead saying similar things about American culture.

As an aside to the main news, Galliwatch has a post on the second “wife” of the new prime minister, Manuel Valls. In keeping with French fashions in political polygamy, Anne Gravoin replaced the mother of Valls’s four children. Tiberge writes of recent political wives:

They all seem similar. Cecilia Sarkozy, Carla Bruni, Ségolène Royal, Valérie Trierweiler, Julie Gayet, and now Anne Gravoin. Hugely ambitious (Cecilia less so), totally dependent on the man in their life for their own celebrity status, vaguely immoral, “cool” fashionistas, very leftist, antagonistic toward the traditional woman be she Madame De Gaulle, Marine Le Pen or Madame Ayrault, they ply the trade of social climber/courtesan with cold-blooded determination. Unfortunately, I don’t find them interesting.

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Marine Corps Second Lt. Sage Santangelo, who is 5′ 3″, boasts that she can pass the grueling Infantry Officer Course — even though she has already failed it.

DON VINCENZO writes:

The Marine, arms crossed and dressed in fatigues with sleeves rolled up to display a well-developed arm, stares right into the camera. The eyes are of an attractive greyish-blue tint, and are set in a face that exudes an air of confidence which has been a tradition and trademark of the U.S. Marines from its founding. This is the face of today’s U.S. Marines; it is also the face a female Marine: 2nd Lt. Sage Santangelo. (Her parents were apparently fond of alliteration.)

Why does 2nd Lt. Santangelo’s photo grace the front page of The Washington Post’s Outlook Section (Mar. 30, 2014)? Well, it appears that the she feels slighted that the Corps did not think enough of her to allow her to lead Infantry Combat Units, so she has been unable to achieve her goal…at least for now. It appears that fourteen female candidates applied for the honor of leading Marine infantry units and demonstrate that they are “as good as men,” but none of the fourteen applicants made it across the finish line. One might add that more than 90% of the male candidates didn’t either.

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Francis with Nicolas Maduro, the Marxist dictator of Venezuela

ATILA Sinke Guimarães continues his analysis of Francis’s apostolic exhortation (also known here as his apostatical exhortation.) He says the document’s teaching on economic matters is “as red as the flag of the Communist Party.”

Gustave Dore

FROM The Three Ages of the Interior Life, by Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.:

As everyone can easily understand, the interior life is an elevated form of intimate conversation which everyone has with himself as soon as he is alone, even in the tumult of a great city. From the moment he ceases to converse with his fellow men, man converses interiorly with himself about what preoccupies him most. This conversation varies greatly according to the different ages of life; that of an old man is not that of a youth. It also varies greatly according as a man is good or bad.

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ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE writes:

It isn’t only Chinese ‘scientists’ who just make stuff up. A Japanese “researcher” has been founded guilty of falsifying date in stem cell research.

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HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

The latest dark twist (pun intended) that feminism and mandated diversity has brought to our new and unimproved armed forces is a flap over women’s hairstyles, as the Army Times reports.  Black soldierettes are complaining that certain restrictions on America’s Amazons’ hairdos are “racially biased.”  This will no doubt lead to the “leadership” of our New Model Army’s getting its panties in a twist trying to figure out how to placate the dissed Amazons who are complaining.

Looking at the pictures of the proscribed fashions, the regulations seem reasonable to me.  Of course, if the U.S. armed forces were reasonable organizations suited to their stated purpose, no such regulations would be necessary.

MICHAEL writes:

FROM Meditations for Lent from St. Thomas Aquinas:

Christ truly suffered for us, leaving us an example in anxieties, contempts, scourgings, the cross, death itself, that we might follow in His steps. If we endure for Christ our own anxieties and sufferings, we shall also reign together with Christ in the happiness that is everlasting. St. Bernard says, ” How few are they, O Lord, who yearn to go after Thee, and yet there is no one that desireth not to come to Thee, for all men know that in Thy right hand are delights that will never fail. All desire to enjoy Thee, but not all to imitate Thee. They would willingly reign with Thee, but spare themselves from suffering with Thee. They have no desire to look for Thee, whom yet they desire to find.”