RESEARCHERS have pored over images of the JFK assassination for decades, but that won't happen with the fake Trump assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. This was too clownish and obvious. It was amateurish political theater and in-your-face mockery of a public that devours lies like sows at a trough of slops. Here's some footage of the crowd scene behind the podium. If emergency workers or police officers treated victims of a real shooting the way they treated the fake wounded in Butler, they would instantly lose their jobs. They would face possible lawsuits from family members. Their careers would be over. No EMT ever carries around the injured this way, as if they were nothing but sacks of sand: Additional footage of this Hoax was released showing off the crisis actors that were supposedly shot in the crowd. There are so many things wrong with this scene - there is zero reality present. The people in the crowd smile, wave their hands around and are pretty comfortable hanging out waiting for direction after 'bullets' were just fired. Quite honestly, I’ve seen people react with far more excitement and urgency for the hotdog and beer vendors than I see in this scene. This crowd just supposedly saw someone get shot in the head and bleed out, yet they never move. The police finally come in to tell them to get down, way after the fake gun shots were fired. The emergency…

"COMMITMENT is doing what you said you would do, after the feeling you said it in, has passed." ---- St. Camillus de Lellis  

We see, then, in looking at a chain of lofty hills, and in thinking of their perpetual waste in the service of the lowlands, that the moral and physical worlds are built on the same pattern. They represent the heroes and all-beneficent genius. They receive upon their heads and sides the larger baptisms from the heavens, not to be selfish with their riches, but to give,—to give all that is poured upon them,—yes, and something of themselves with every stream and tide.

                                                                             — Thomas Starr King

THE MOUNTAIN  is so many things at once – a geological event, a meteorological force, a region of staggered botanical zones – that it is easy to forget that it is also a metaphysical event, the object of rich and varied contemplation. Mountains are schools and cathedrals, John Ruskin wrote, and all but the most insensible minds are educated and refined by alpine experiences. Mountains are, as Ruskin put it, “full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper.” In rock and ravine, forest and crag, mountains utter spiritual truths, sermons in stone that can never be fully translated into words.

There are mountains of books about mountains. Many of these are guides about natural history, about the dwarf cinquefoil that grows on alpine slopes, the glacial erratics and krummholz, the wind patterns and ice formations that characterize the higher altitudes. Plenty of other books recount mountain adventures and feats, daring expeditions up Everest or Denali. But it is no so easy to find books about what mountains mean, about their influence on the psyche.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Thomas Starr King took to rambling through the White Mountains of New Hampshire at a time when alpine jaunts were still relatively new to Americans. The book he wrote recording his research and observations, The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape and Poetry, was a bestseller at the time it was published in 1859 and it remains, despite its occasional lapses into unrestrained rhapsody, one of the most charming meditations on the beauty and symbolism of mountains. (more…)

"VOTERS are addicts. They continue to buy what their dealers sell them. They get high on the lie and crash when reality sets in. Don't even try to reason with them because they will lash out - at YOU. The turnaround is always 'just over the horizon.' Just one more election and then it'll all be ok. "It's obvious things are bad, but lying to oneself and others is the greatest talent of the addict. "So for now, they will just buy another hit from the pushers by voting harder and trying to drag down everyone around them with their delusions ... telling themselves they can quit anytime they want, if things get bad enough. "It was never supposed to be like this. There are no political solutions because 9 out of 10 people are part of the problem." -- @TonyMicelliAyOh  

 MOST Republicans are too caught up in the afterglow of a fake assassination attempt to care about anti-Christian prayers at the GOP convention.  

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NEIL writes: Here is the latest on the upcoming Olympics in Paris. From The Washington Post: An age-old form of physical activity is set to make a comeback at this summer’s Paris Olympic Games: sex, or as the French call it, “sport in the room.” Organizers in the City of Love are not only turning the page on the covid-era intimacy ban imposed on athletes at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 — they plan to make 300,000 condoms available to residents of the Olympic Village. With that quantity, every resident “will have what they are expecting and what they need,” said Laurent Michaud, director of the Olympic and Paralympic Village, in an interview with Sky News. If I recall correctly, Benedict XVI said the Olympics were great.  

TRUMP flashes Communist fist after he’s allegedly shot.

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[This entry was initially posted on Nov. 9, 2021. Things in Owego might be somewhat different now, but I doubt it.]

OWEGO VILLAGE, NEW YORK is a gem of a small town.

On the lovely green banks of the Susquehanna River in Tioga County, almost a four-hour drive northwest of Manhattan, it features charming nineteenth-century houses — some ornate and stately, others modest but with character, not all in pristine condition but all on tree-lined streets with sidewalks.

My husband and I recently spent a fall day in Owego, enjoying the autumn foliage and visiting with a wonderful friend who lives there.

There’s a little downtown with shops, cafes and modest office buildings in architecturally distinctive buildings, the sort of retail district that is so rare in this age of strip malls. The library, the former school building (now transformed into apartments) and the courthouse date from pre-Communist America and exude the dignity in public service that once characterized public buildings.

Here is a photo of the opening of the J.J. Newberry five and dime store in 1958 on Lake Street in Owego. (more…)

"A broken heart and God’s will done would be better than that God's will should be avoided." --- Msgr. R.H. Benson  

"NEVER again" is the core ideology behind everything happening today. It’s why we are flooded with brown immigrants. It’s why they push LGBTQ. It’s why White people have to hate themselves. Your country is a brown, White-hating, homosexual hellscape to prevent another “holocaust.” -- Apolitical  

"CONTRARY to the belief that race is only skin-deep and that all persons are essentially the same, we were now to believe that all whites are essentially wicked, the whole of American history is racist and irredeemably vicious, and all 'BIPOCs' are noble, superior even, and worthy of a kind of veneration. In other words, everything now is quite literally black and white. Blacks only ever fail because of whites, and whites only ever succeed because of blacks. I was horrified by the 1619 Project, the epitome of all this, and horrified that every single white liberal I’d ever known seemed utterly entranced by this nonsense. "This was when I had a stark and sudden realization: after all the help that American society has given blacks in particular, including trillions in state and federal spending, endless affirmative action, and endless groveling praise and accommodation, blacks are in worse shape, collectively and often individually, than they have ever been. And so we seem to have reached an inflection point. Either we admit that they are simply incapable of participating in our Anglo-American civilization in the productive and creative ways that whites routinely do, or we blame whites for everything. The experiment has simply gone on for too long now, and has too obviously failed. We have to come up with some answer as to why it failed, and it’s either option A (blacks are not capable of living as we do),…

IN Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (Bombardier Books, 2023), Jeff Fynn-Paul writes of the book's cover: Our cover illustration, which depicts Dutch governor Peter Minuit’s famous purchase of Manhattan Island in 1626, is a painting by the British-American illustrator Alfred Fredericks (1853–1926). Like many paintings of its day, it contains historical anachronisms that make it an easy target for modern critics, who may reflexively condemn it as a sentimental whitewashing of the genocidal theft of Indian land. But Fredericks’ painting reveals a more nuanced story to those who look past the hype. For one thing, the painter’s brush carefully portrays the Natives’ individuality, humanity, and dignity. Respect for the Indians and their way of life was surprisingly common amongst European-Americans in the later nineteenth century. The Scouting movement was founded on the idea that Indians were role models of bravery, intelligence, honesty and other virtues. Many thousands of Americans dedicated their careers and fortunes to the betterment of Native lives. Moreover, the focus of the painting is the purchase of Manhattan—by mutual consent. By most definitions, a sale is the opposite of theft. It would be misleading to suggest, as many critics do, that the Natives were cynically taken advantage of when they parted with the island for twenty-four dollars worth of “trinkets.” Dutch administrators studiously recognized Native land claims as a matter of policy. To the Indians themselves, the mosquito-ridden island was of…

“TRAVEL the length and breadth of the land, cast your eyes behind and before you, devour space and time, and you shall find nothing in the dominion of men, but what is stated here — a pain which never abates, and an increasing lamentation. And this pain, voluntarily accepted, is the measure of all greatness, because there is no greatness without sacrifice, and sacrifice is merely pain voluntarily accepted. Those whom the world calls heroes, are they who, when transfixed with a sword of pain, voluntarily accepted the pain with its sword. Those whom the Church calls saints, are they who accepted all pains, those of the spirit as well as those of the flesh. The saints are those who, when beseiged by avarice, laid aside all the treasures of the world ; who, when solicited by gluttony, remained sober; who, when burned by lust, holily accepted the combat, and were chaste ; who, when entering on the battle, were assailed by filthy thoughts, and remained pure; who rose so high by humility that they conquered pride ; who, when saddened by another’s prosperity, made such an effort, as to convert their base sadness into holy joy ; who flung to earth the ambition which raised them to the stars; who changed their idleness into diligence;  who, when weighed down by sadness, gave a bill of divorce to their sadness, and rose by a generous effort to spiritual joy ; who, when enamoured of themselves, renounced their self-love for love of others, and with heroic abnegation offered their hfe for them in perfect holocaust. (more…)

"PREVARICATING and fallen man was not made for the truth, nor was truth made for prevaricating and fallen man. Between truth and human reason, after the prevarication of man, God established a lasting repugnance and an invincible repulsion. Truth has in itself the titles of its sovereignty, and does not ask leave to impose its yoke; whilst man, since he rebelled against God, does not tolerate any sovereignty but his own, unless it first ask his leave and assent. Hence, when the truth comes within sight, he immediately begins to deny it, and to deny it is to affirm himself in quality of independent sovereign. "... [B]etween human reason and the absurd there is a secret affinity and a close relationship. Sin has united them with the bond of indissoluble matrimony. The absurd triumphs over man precisely because it is devoid of all rights anterior and superior to human reason. Man accepts it precisely because it comes naked; because, being devoid of rights, it has no pretensions. His will accepts it because it is the offspring of his understanding, and his understanding takes delight in it, because it is its own offspring, its own verbum, because it is a living testimony of its creative power." -- Juan Donoso Cortés,  Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism and Socialism – Considered in Their Fundamental Principles (M. H. Gill & Son, 1879)