A human being achieves order in relation to that which is not human. When pondering the world of the Olympic athlete, we see this law in effect. The earliest Olympic athletes in Ancient Greece oriented themselves toward the supernatural. They strove to be like the swift-footed gods. Sacrifices were offered on altars before the start of the athletic games, which took place outside the sacred temple zone. Body and spirit were working toward some kind of balance. They were not at constant war.

The contemporary Olympic athlete, by contrast, defines himself in relation to the machine. His existence is reduced to highly-exacting scientific regimens designed to make both body and mind conform to machine-like regularity and control. He lives for years in an artificial, denatured world of flourescent-lit gyms and fitness machines. He is fed scientifically, like a laboratory animal. He wears not clothes, but freakish synthetic outfits invented by scientists and athletic technocrats. He has no leisure. His mind is bent at all times, as he stands before the control panel of his own body, upon infinitesimal differences in performance. A split second can make all the difference, in the way a split second can make all the difference in the smooth functioning of mechanical gears. Athletics supposedly make him a better person.  But it must take him years after leaving this confining, technocratic sphere in which body and spirit are estranged to conquer the wild frontiers of his own soul.

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PROVING once and for all that the government is fully behind the Pizza-Industrial Complex (and that squandering money is a bureaucratic imperative), the U.S. Department of Agriculture has just released a study on pizza consumption. About one in eight Americans consume pizza on any given day. Whites consume more of it than blacks and Hispanics, which goes a long way toward explaining why 60 percent of white men appear to be nine months pregnant. In short, the nation is hooked on a loathsome industrial concoction of white bread, tomato paste and greasy rubber. The sacred tradition of dinnertime drudgery is virtually unknown in countless homes and has been supplanted by the grease-stained cardboard box.

I believe these figures are far too low. Most people are not honest when it comes to pizza intake. Notice how the “study” did not correlate pizza to any health (or ill health) indicators. Do you think the government wants people to know?

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KARL D. writes:

While I don’t agree all the time with Laura Ingraham, she is one of the best attack dogs out there in TV land. I caught her this past Sunday morning on FOX news battling on immigration. Essentially, she was on her own against the entire panel. A panel that consisted of one liberal and two so-called conservatives. One of which was the loathsome George Will. I was jumping up and down in front of the screen as she virtually destroyed them with her arguments. The only thing lacking in her position was the huge elephant in the room, which is the destruction of America both culturally and demographically. She merely skirted around it with the dropping of the tired old assimilation word, and only as an after thought. Of course that would be too much to hope for and you can only argue so many points in the constrained time frame. Otherwise, it was a great and classic clip in my humble opinion.  (more…)

MAYBE I am too harsh regarding the Vatican II Church. Here Jorge Bergoglio says a Children’s Mass in Argentina in 2011. Perhaps millions of martyrs died for this. [Courtesy of Novus Ordo Watch.]

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JEAN PAUL writes:

The Sackville Hotel on the strand in Hove was a great, old Edwardian pile. Faded glory, a nice old place to stay on our visits to the town on the English Channel where my mother was born and raised. She came to Canada as an 18-year-old war bride in 1944 and is 88 now, in her own house for 64 years. She still speaks of England as “home.”

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IN 2004, the late Sam Francis wrote a column for VDare.com about an especially lewd Monday Night Football ad featuring Nicolette Sheridan. The column is worth revisiting because he makes an important point. Conservative commentators had complained about the sexual innuendo of the ad, but Francis, the former Washington Times columnist who was fired for his writings on race, objected to its racial message as well:

The message of the ad was that white women are eager to have sex with black men, that they should be eager, and that black men should take them up on it.

So far only one voice has mentioned the ad’s racial meaning and denounced its “insensitivity” (to blacks)—that of black Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy.

Blacks are permitted to notice race. Whites aren’t.

But the ad’s message also was that interracial sex is normal and legitimate, a fairly radical concept for both the dominant media as well as its audience.

Nevertheless, for decades, interracial couples of different sexes have been sneaked into advertising, movies and television series, and almost certainly not because of popular demand from either race. The Owens-Sheridan match is only the most notorious to date.

In the minds of those who produced the ad, race is at least as important as the moral and aesthetic norms their ad subverts. (more…)

SHARBEL FERRO writes:

I recently read a part of your website (here and here) in which you explain that you conclude that Francis I is not the pope of the Catholic Church, and that the Chair is empty. I too have this view, and I am convinced of it in the deepest fibres of my heart. I have held this view for about three years now.

Can I share with you how I came to the sedevacantist position? I think it my be of interest to you, and supportive, because from some of the things you say on your website, it has plenty in common with my own journey. (Actually, I think almost all sedevacantists have a very similar journey to reach their conclusion.)

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  DRAWING attention again to a previous post, I offer this poem by Keith Jacka, one of series of five poems titled "English Girls," which was posted in February, 2011. "Annie Rose" is about the poet's mother.

THE latest condemnation of the Catholic Church by the United Nations comes after years of appeasement by the Vatican II Church. Here is a previous post at Tradition in Action on the surrender of the Conciliar Church to the U.N.:

The old dream of the Babel Tower – to establish the unity of mankind without God – has been a dream of Freemasonry for centuries. In 1919, after World War I, Masonry established the League of Nations in order to foster a federation of all the countries of the world under its control. Notwithstanding, from 1923 on, it started to fall apart, and its demise was a consummate fact by the beginning of World War II.

In 1945, after WWII, the United Nations was founded to achieve the same goal of its precursor – the establishment of a Universal Republic without God. In 1948 it adopted as its ideal the Declaration of the Rights of Man from the French Revolution. The UN is an organization with an Agnostic philosophy, a Masonic inspiration and a practical disregard of God. It should never receive the support of the Catholic Church, the true Church of God. (more…)

THE spiritual implosion of America, which comes with the inability to sustain a manufacturing and agricultural economy, is particularly vivid in Vermont, now the land of heroin and single mothers. Geoffrey Norman, writing in The Weekly Standard, quotes a single mother who says Vermont is actually a good place to be an addict because there are so many accomodating government programs.

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THERE is virtually nothing about this in the American press, but Galliawatch has a report on the decision by the French government to abandon a law that would allow surrogate parenting. Tiberge wrote on Monday:

[The] French government has announced a re-examination of the laws on the Family, and a pledge to oppose surrogate motherhood and medically assisted procreation. These are major concessions from a government that has not budged from its position for a year.

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WE were without electricity for most of the week due to damaging storms and that’s why you have not heard much from me. We had no Internet connection and it was difficult to connect anywhere nearby. More than half a million people were without power and most of them still don’t have electricity. Ten inches of snow fell, followed by freezing rain and then regular, normal, wet rain. It all stuck to the trees. For awhile, the roads were blocked in almost every direction with downed trees. A tree fell on the roof of one neighbor’s house and another fell across the driveway of our next-door neighbor. Sadly, a man in a nearby town was killed by a falling limb while he was helping a neighbor lift a branch.

Things are slowly getting back to normal. We have heat, but our house is still encased in ice.

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A BLOGGER named Wild Outlander analysizes the hipster’s craving for authenticity and says, if I read him correctly, that this craving ultimately stems from the artificiality of the hipster’s pose.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

If the U.S. is failing domestically, it is also declining internationally – in its importance and the prestige that it brings to any negotiation. When the State Department became “an equal opportunity employer,” all bets were off about the future of our foreign relations, and I can describe no better example of this than a recent hearing by President Obama’s selection of three candidates as ambassadors to China, Hungary and Norway, a country where I served at the U.S. Embassy during the late 1980s. (The Washington Post, Federal Page, Jan. 31, 2014.)

Starting with retiring Sen. Max Baucus, the candidate for U.S. Ambassador to China, who began with answering his first question with the response, “I’m no real expert on China,” the mood was set. Colleen Bell, a Hollywood producer who “bundled” $800,000 to the Obama campaign, was clueless about our strategic objectives in Hungary, and George Tsunis, a CEO of  a hotel chain, who “bundled 1.3 million to the Obama campaign in 2012, responded to his questions in a way, described by the Norwegian news outlet, NRK, as “faltering, incoherent and displayed a “total ignorance” of the country.” Does this matter? (more…)

IN this interview by Lifesite News, Bernadette Smyth, a leading anti-abortion organizer in Ireland, talks about the recent legalization of abortion in the Republic of Ireland. After passage of an abortion bill last July, abortion is now legal in Ireland for all nine months of pregnancy whenever the mother’s life is in danger. Since depression is considered endangering the life of a mother, the bill essentially legalized abortion for any woman who wants it.

Smyth blames the success of the abortion bill on the redefinition of the issue as a human rights campaign by pro-life activists. She says in doing this, activists became mere marchers and protestors. They had degraded their cause. They had lost sense of the supernatural element of the battle. She also says Conciliar Church leaders in Ireland (that’s the false Vatican II Church, not the true Catholic Church) have outrageously accommodated pro-abortion politicians.

Her words are heartfelt and moving. “The Irish people put God out of the battle. And I think that’s really sad.”

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IN SOME parts of America, the decadence that is everywhere is especially apparent. In his recent State of the State Address, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin addressed the scourge of heroin and opiate addiction that has been building for years.

In every corner of our state, heroin and opiate drug addiction threatens us. It threatens the safety that has always blessed our state. It is a crisis bubbling just beneath the surface that may be invisible to many, but is already highly visible to law enforcement, medical personnel, social service and addiction treatment providers, and too many Vermont families. It requires all of us to take action before the quality of life that we cherish so much is compromised. (more…)

[This is a re-post of a previous entry. My power has been down for the last 24 hours due to heavy snow and so it seemed relevant.]

SNOWFLAKES are ice crystals that form around dust particles or other microscopic matter in the upper atmosphere. A typical snowflake is a conglomeration of crystals, most damaged as they fall from the heights. A hundred years ago, the science of snow was still in its infancy. Since then, the systematic study of snow has advanced rapidly with greater understanding of its properties and classification of crystals and snow packs. The measurement and management of snow are both consuming issues. Though snow is now the stuff of formal expertise, and probably makes for some tedious dissertations for the general reader, who could ever find the subject dull?

Ken Libbrecht is chairman of the physics department at California Institute of Technology and the creator of one of the more interesting natural history sites on the Internet. SnowCrystals.com presents the science of snow with an appreciation for the beauty of its subject matter. I highly recommend it.

“I feel that with over six billion people on the planet, surely a few of us can be spared to ponder the subtle mysteries of snowflakes,” writes Libbrecht, who is the author of The Secret Life of a Snowflake and other books. His website is an excellent source for homeschoolers. He offers a short summary of the major scientific discoveries, starting with Johannes Kepler. He writes:

In 1611 Johannes Kepler published a short treatise On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, [1] which was the first scientific reference to snow crystals. Kepler pondered the question of why snow crystals always exhibit a six-fold symmetry. Although he doesn’t refer to the atomistic viewpoint, Kepler does speculate that the hexagonal close-packing of spheres may have something to do with the morphology of snow crystals. Kepler was astute in recognizing that the genesis of crystalline symmetry was an interesting scientific question, and he also realized that he did not have the means to answer it. It would be 300 years before Kepler’s question could finally be answered, requiring the development of X-ray crystallography.

Below is Libbrecht’s chart of the most common types of snow crystals:

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