OBESITY is part of the dramatic cultural decline that has overtaken Ireland with the loss of its Catholic heritage.

The country is on its way to becoming the fattest in Europe.

I HOPE this recording of the ever-popular second movement of Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, also known as the New World Symphony, fills you with affection for your country today.

The symphony was composed in 1893 while Dvořák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America and was first performed in New York City.

The Czech composer “wrote that he would not have composed his American pieces as he had if he had not seen America. It has been said that Dvořák was inspired by the ‘wide open spaces’ of America, such as prairies he may have seen on his trip to Iowa in the summer of 1893. Notices about several performances of the symphony include the phrase ‘wide open spaces’ about what inspired the symphony and/or about the feelings it conveys to listeners.” (Source)

The piece evokes so much that is beautiful about America — things best said in sound.

THE organized riots in France are justified by the history of French colonization of Algeria.

Rarely mentioned is the motivation for French involvement. The 19th-century military raid on Algiers was intended, in part, to stop the Barbary slave trade, which had enslaved so many Europeans from the 1500’s to mid-1800s that population density along some parts of the coasts of Europe declined dramatically.

The Regency of Algiers was one of the main bases of the Barbary pirates and Barbary Slave Traders who attacked Christian ships and coastal settlements in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. Like the rest of the Barbary Coast, the Regency of Algiers lived from the trade of slaves or goods captured from Europe, America and sub-Saharan Africa. The European powers bombarded Algiers on different occasions in retaliation and the United States provoked the Barbary Wars in order to put an end to Algerian privateering against Christian shipping.^[18]

The conquest of Algeria began in the last days of the Bourbon Restoration by Charles X of France. It aimed to put a definite end to Barbary privateering and increase the king’s popularity among the French people, particularly in Paris, where many veterans of the Napoleonic Wars lived. Algerian slave trade and piracy immediately ceased after the French conquered Algiers. (Source)

Christians sold as slaves in Algiers

Slavery in the American colonies was a piece of cake compared to slavery under the Ottomans. Boys and women were used as sex slaves and many slaves were worked to death.

Robert Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from the beginning of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th (these numbers do not include the European people who were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean Sea coast) (Source)

By some estimates, 10 to 18 million people, including Africans, were enslaved altogether by Arab slave traders.

In Europe,

From at least 1500, the pirates also conducted raids on seaside towns of Italy, Spain, France, England, the Netherlands and as far away as Iceland, capturing men, women and children. In 1544, Hayreddin Barbarossa captured the island of Ischia, taking 4,000 prisoners, and enslaved some 2,000–7,000 inhabitants of Lipari.^[9][10] In 1551, Ottoman corsair Dragut enslaved the entire population of the Maltese island of Gozo, between 5,000 and 6,000, sending them to Ottoman Tripolitania. In 1554 corsairs under Dragut sacked Vieste, beheaded 5,000 of its inhabitants, and abducted another 6,000.^[11] The Balearic Islands were invaded in 1558, and 4,000 people were taken into slavery.^[12] In 1618 the Algerian pirates attacked the Canary Islands taking 1000 captives to be sold as slaves.^[13] On some occasions, settlements such as Baltimore in Ireland were abandoned following a raid, only being resettled many years later. Between 1609 and 1616, England alone lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates.^[14]

The French conquest of Algeria brought the slave trade to an end.

JEAN-FRANCOIS Gariépy reviews the situation in France.

You can also view the video clip here, starting at minute 43:00.

Morning Glories, Winslow Homer

MALE PAINTERS have given us countless paintings of women in summer.

They have depicted women in gardens, women on the beach, women on cliffs, women sitting under trees in silent forests. They have painted women reading books on garden benches, women lying in hammocks, women sunbathing, women with parasols, women in canoes and women swimming in the sea. They have painted moody women and entrancing women and innocent women and indolent women.

The subject of women in summer is a natural one. For the tranquility and beauty of summer moments correspond to the feminine at its best.

Men (and female artists too) have lavishly portrayed the contemplative side of women in summer paintings. Pagan artists of Greece and Rome produced female nudes, often exquisite. But they could not capture what later artists did with the fully clothed woman in a summer landscape. The soul took precedence over the sensual, without eclipsing it. (All of these paintings, by the way, would be absurd with women in pants. The dress is the ceremonial expression of the contemplative side of women. Pants are for doing, and also obliterate the inspiring, mysterious differentiation of the sexes.)

Contemplative men may become great philosophers, contemplative women rarely achieve fame in the world or the heights of intellect. Their mental activity is not any less important or essential. That’s what these paintings suggest. The world needs this stillness. There would be no philosophers without it.

Life demands activity, constant work and accomplishment from men, often cruelly. What is it worth, how can it go on, how can civilization go on, without the calm created by pools of feminine reverie? Its nothingness is indeed something.

But these are indeed aristocratic thoughts in a proletarian, Soviet-style age.

Feminists like to say men historically excluded women from the world of art. Nonsense. Women are art. In their being, not their accomplishments, these ideal women complement the glories of summer. The great sacrifices involved in producing these works (feminists speak of art as if it is power when in fact it is usually lonely abnegation and grueling work) attest to how much men are driven not just by outward beauty, although definitely that, but by this mysterious inner dimension.

[Thanks to It’s About Time for these images, which are a tiny sample of the paintings of women in summer landscapes.]

Mrs. Chase in Prospect Park, William Merritt Chase; 1886

Read More »

“JUST as it is with those who break the laws, when punishment overtakes them: they throw the blame upon those who frame the laws , but not upon themselves. In like manner do those men, filled with a satanic spirit, bring innumerable accusations against our Creator, who has both given to us the spirit of life, and established a law adapted for all; and they will not admit that the judgment of God is just.”

— St. Irenaeus, d. 202

THERE is no changing the realities of race. Anyone who says it is un-Christian to consider these realities suffers from excessive idealism and possible hubris. God made us body and soul. We cannot spiritualize our physical nature, including traits inherited from our ancestors, away. A race is an extended family. Race is more than just skin color. It involves psychology, temperament, and deeply ingrained spiritual instincts. To recognize racial realities is not to “hate” those of other races anymore than to prefer one’s family is to hate other families nor is it necessarily to embark on some equally unrealistic campaign for racial purity or total racial determinism.

Along those lines, here is a good summary from Thuletide of race in American politics, as gleaned from the 2022 presidential election:

People of First World origin (Whites and Asians) hold, per capita, more resources than people of Third World origin (Hispanics and Africans).

People of Third World origin stand to gain resources (territory, jobs, welfare, etc.) from Leftist social and economic policies (pro-mass migration, affirmative action, etc.). Therefore, ethnocentric Third Worlders are more likely to support Left-Wing politics, even if they are often socially conservative.

[As Thuletide shows elsewhere, Asians are also much more likely to support left-wing policies.]

People of First World origin stand to lose resources from Leftist policies. Therefore, ethnocentric First Worlders are more likely to support Right-Wing politics.

This is simply a case of offensive and defensive politics: The Left-Wing represents migrants and people who aim to take resources from the native population. The Right-Wing represents the native population aiming to defend their resources (and the intelligent migrants who also stand to lose resources from Leftism). Read More »

“[BIOLOGIST LOUIS] Agassiz wrote: ‘Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races, and is inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the amalgamation of races, more widespread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.’

“The mongrel’s political ascendancy produces precisely the results which might have been expected. These unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability. The normal state of tropical America is anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters. Garcia-Calderon exactly describes its psychology when he writes: ‘Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourses; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.’ The tropical republics display, indeed, a tendency toward “‘atomic disintegration. … Given to dreaming, they are led by presidents suffering from neurosis.

“The stock feature of the mongrel tropics is, of course, the ‘revolution.’ These senseless and perennial outbursts are often ridiculed in the United States as comic opera, but the grim truth of the matter is that few Latin American revolutions are laughing matters. The numbers of men engaged may not be very large according to our standards, but measured by the scanty populations of the countries concerned, they lay a heavy blood-tax on the suffering peoples. The tatterdemalion “‘armies’’ may excite our mirth, but the battles are real enough, often fought out to the death with razor-edged machetes and rusty bayonets, and there is no more ghastly sight than a Latin American battle-field. The commandeerings, burnings, rapings, and assassinations inflicted upon the hapless civilian population cry to heaven. There is always wholesale destruction of property, frequently appalling loss of life, and a general paralysis of economic and social activity. These wretched lands have now been scourged by the revolutionary plague for a hundred years, and W. B. Hale does not overstate the consequences when he says: ‘Most of the countries clustering about the Caribbean have sunk into deeper and deeper mires of misrule, unmatched for profligacy and violence anywhere on earth. Revolution follows revolution; one band of brigands succeeds another; atrocities revenge atrocities; the plundered people grow more and more abject in poverty and slavishness; vast natural resources lie neglected, while populations decrease, civilization recedes, and the jungle advances.’’! Of course, under these frightful circumstances, the national character, weak enough at best, degenerates at an ever-quickening pace. Peaceful effort of any sort appears vain and ridiculous, and men are taught that wealth is procurable only by violence and extortion.”

— Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy, (Charles Scribner and Sons, 1921), p. 120

ATTENDEES at a “Pride” fest surround a street preacher and bark like dogs.

It’s all about love.

 “THE faith of our fathers never ignored the great benefits for which both individuals and nations are indebted to Saint John. So many neophytes received his name in baptism, so efficacious was the aid afforded by him in conducting his clients to sanctity, that there is not a day in the Calendar, on which there may not be honoured the heavenly birthday of one or other so named (Annus Johannis, auctore Johanne N. [Pragae, 1664]). Amongst nations, the Lombards formerly claimed Saint John as Patron, and French Canada does the same now-a-days. But whether in East or West, who could count the countries, towns, religious families, abbeys, and churches placed under this same powerful patronage: from the temple which, under Theodosius, replaced that of the ancient Serapis in Alexandria with its famous mysteries, to the sanctuary raised upon the ruins of the altar of Apollo, on the summit of Monte Cassino, by the Patriarch of monks; from the fifteen churches which Byzantium, the new Rome, consecrated within her walls in honour of the Precursor, to the august Basilica of Lateran, well worthy of its epithet, the golden Basilica, and which in the Capital of Christendom remains for ever Mother and Mistress of all churches, not alone of the City, but of the whole world! Dedicated at first to our Saviour, this latter Basilica added at an early date another title which seems inseparable from this sacred name, that of the Friend of the Bridegroom. Saint John the Evangelist, also a ‘friend of Jesus,’ whose precious death is placed by one tradition on the Twenty-fourth day of June, has likewise had his name added to the other two borne by this Basilica; but all the same, it is none the less certain, that common practice is in keeping with ancient documents, in referring, as it does, more especially to the Precursor, the title of Saint John Lateran, whereby the patriarchal Basilica of the Roman Pontiffs is always designated in these days.”

— Dom Prosper Gueranger on the Feast of St. John the Baptist, June 24th

Here is the Litany of St. John the Baptist: Read More »

ENJOY a touching recollection of Irish bonfires for St. John’s Eve, the day before the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist on June 24th.

Hymn: Antra deserti

Thou, in thy childhood, to the desert caverns
Fleddest for refuge from the cities’ turmoil,
Where the world’s slander might not dim thy luster,
Lonely abiding.

Camel’s hair raiment clothed thy saintly members;
Leathern the girdle which thy loins encircled;
Locusts and honey, with the fountain-water,
Daily sustained thee.

Oft in past ages, seers with hearts expectant
Sang the far-distant advent of the Daystar;
Thine was the glory, as the world’s Redeemer
First to proclaim him.

Far as the wide world reacheth, born of woman,
Holier was there none than John the Baptist;
Meetly in water laving him who cleanseth
Man from pollution.

Praise to the Father, to the Sole-begotten,
And to the Spirit, equal power possessing,
One God whose glory, through the lapse of ages,
Ever resoundeth. Amen.

FROM Fitzpatrick Informer:

“IN Is Alex Jones externalizing the hierarchy?, I discussed how Alex Jones serves as cathartic relief for those resisting the New World Order and how he helps to get the masses comfortable with the NWO, thereby diffusing their opposition to it, making for a smoother transition to the one-world government.

“To expand on that, I will break down some of the more technical methods Jones uses to psychologically traumatize his audience into accepting the New World Order, including his use of subliminal messages and neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which is basically the manipulation of communication to provoke at the subconcious level (here is a good video example of how powerful NLP can be). NLP is most prominently used by salesman and mind programmers.

“The most obvious and ubiquitous programming Jones uses is the power of suggestion. You can set your watch by it. As of the writing of this article, Jones did it today on his show. He does it every single show. And that suggestion is the seemingly snide imitation of the elite. If you are listener, you know what I am talking about. It’s when Jones raises his voice and assumes the personality of one of the “elite” and then goes on to mock us victims of the NWO. He does not do this merely to entertain you. It is subtle suggestion and mockery of the victim—you, the listener. It’s a sort of psychodrama. What results from this process is the instilling of fear and learned helplessness into the listener (see Learned helplessness through the alternative media). And if I and many others are correct that Jones is working for the bad guys, then this suggestive programming is to mock us, which feeds their appetite as they destroy us with their world takeover.”

Bathers or Beach Scene, Mark Rothko

“ROTHKO’s skill in rendering the human form was poor, which is evident in early works like Bathers or Beach Scene (Untitled) (1933/4). [Author Simon] Schama admits as much, noting that: “When he [Rothko] stood in the Brooklyn [Jewish Center] classroom [where he taught art classes from 1929–46] it all seemed so easy. He would tell the children not to mind the rules — painting, he said, was as natural as singing. It should be like music but when he tried it came out as a croak. It’s the work of a painfully knotted imagination. No not very good.”According to the general consensus, Rothko “never stood out as a great draughtsman and could even at times appear clumsy in the execution of his oil paintings.”

“Rothko, in a speech in the mid-thirties, offered a quasi-philosophical rationale for the unimportance of technical skill, stressing “the difference between sheer skill, and skill that is linked to spirit, expressiveness and personality.” He insisted that artistic expression was “unrelated to manual ability or painterly technique, that it is drawn from an inborn feeling for form; the ideal lies in the spontaneity, simplicity and directness of children.” Such grandiloquent pronouncements from Rothko were not unusual, with Collings noting that “Rothko was outrageously over-fruity and grandiose in his statements about art and religion and the solemn importance of his own art.”

“This tendency on his part prompted one writer to declare: “What I find amazing … is how a painting which is two rectangles of different colors can somehow prompt thousands upon thousands of words on the human condition, Marxist dialectics, and social construction.” He suggests a good rule of thumb is “the more obtuse terms an artist and his supporters use to describe a work, the less worth the painting has.  By this definition Rothko may be the most worthless artist in the history of humanity.”

— Brenton Sanderson, “Rothko, Abstract Expressionism and the Decline of Western Art,” 2020 Read More »

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ALAN writes:

Recently I spoke with a woman who grew up in St. Louis in the 1950s, as did I.  She was educated in Catholic schools, as was I, but in neighborhoods far apart.

She told me she had two aunts who enjoyed shopping downtown. They did not drive, so they depended on the streetcars or buses to take them downtown and back.  Occasionally they took a taxi.

One day, she told me, they called a taxi company and said, “White driver, please.”

Can’t you hear the “Liberals” howling “Evil and indefensible!”?

It did not seem that way to my acquaintance when she was a girl in the 1950s. But it seems that way to her now. She professes to be shocked by what her aunts said.  She seems to think it was a BAD THING to say and to do.  That, of course, is the standard “Liberal” dogma that has been pounded into Americans for the last 70 years.  Apparently my acquaintance absorbed that dogma and now believes her aunts were guilty of WRONG-THINK and WRONG-SPEAK.  Apparently she sees nothing wrong when government busybodies forbid Americans today to make and act upon the kinds of choices her aunts and other Americans made routinely in the 1950s.

Excuse me, but I see everything wrong with it. I contend not only that there is nothing wrong with “White driver, please”, but that her aunts had an inalienable right to say it and stand by it.  It is an exercise in freedom of choice. It does not prevent anyone else from choosing any taxi driver he desires.

To believe otherwise is, in effect, to annul common sense, the principle of individual rights, freedom of choice and freedom of association in an open marketplace, and the principle of limited government.  And for what?  For the limitless expansion of government power on the pretext of “hurt feelings” claimed by people who want something for nothing.

If you think you do not “discriminate”, think again.  If you are alive and want to remain that way, then you must discriminate endlessly. Read More »

My father-in-law’s five children. We don’t have any decent pictures of him.

[Reposted from June, 2014 — Happy Father’s Day to all fathers who find their way to this site.]

FATHER’S DAY brings to mind a father I never knew. My father-in-law, Frank Wood, was dead — and had been dead for ten years — by the time I married my husband 27 years ago.

Though I never met him, it’s not as if I don’t know him. I think I know him pretty well and if he walked in the front door today, I would probably recognize him and know exactly what to offer him. However, I don’t think he would walk in the door if he were alive. He was a man bound to his home and his neighborhood for all but two weeks of the year.

I have a vivid image of him, sitting at the kitchen table on a Sunday evening, having spent a weekend of leisure both at home and at the Eagle Club nearby, and announcing to the assembled at dinner, “Well, the ball game’s over now.” He has told his last story and retold his last joke. He has read his last detective story and flipped the pages of his last adventure magazine. He is approaching his final bites of “rope beef.” Those words on Sunday night signaled that his extended time at home was over and the new week, when he would return to the shipyard where he worked as a machinist, had begun. Read More »