“THERE is a place in the Atlantic Ocean which sailors call the “Devil’s Hole.” Contrary currents hurl their torrents upon each other there, causing such commotion in the waters that navigation is always difficult. If you ever passed over it when the weather was good, you wondered why the sea was so rough and the ship rocked so much. If you asked one of the seamen for an explanation of this strange phenomenon, he answered you: ‘This is the Devil’s Hole; the currents meet here.’

“In the voyage of life, my dear brethren, there is a ‘Devil’s Hole’ in our track. It is the abyss of pride. Like the whirlpool, it is very much hidden; the appearances are all fair, and this makes the danger all the greater. You are, when swayed by pride, unconscious of the condition of your soul. You feel disturbed and blinded as to its cause. Envy and hatred rise up in your heart, but you do not see their hideousness because, forsooth, your self-conceit or self-will has been offended by those who are wiser and better than you, and this galls you. You can’t have your own way, and you are sad. You want to rule, and because you cannot you fancy yourself wronged. The whole difficulty is simply this: You have too good an opinion of yourself. Now, when you come to look seriously into your own heart, are you not forced to acknowledge this? Is not this the root of the whole evil? When you begin to understand and realize this, and try to conquer self-esteem, you become tranquil and find peace. Your passion subsides.

“St. Bernard says that in order to cure pride we should reflect upon three questions: ” First, what was I before I was created? Absolute nothingness. And in what state did I come into the world? It was as a poor, helpless infant that would have perished but for the care of others. ‘I was conceived in iniquity,’ and have I not committed countless actual sins?” What consideration can teach humility better than this? Ah, yes! if we would escape from the ” Devil’s Hole,” the abyss of pride, we must constantly be mindful of our own nothingness.”

— The Root of All Sin by the Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul, 1893

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“The enemies we have to fight with are of two kinds: internal and external. The first are our passions; the second are the devils. Both were brought on us by pride, and man’s pride began when he refused to obey his God. God forgave him his sin, but He punished him. The punishment was death, and this was the form of the divine sentence: Thou art dust, and into dust thou shalt return. Oh that we had remembered this! The recollection of what we are and what we are to be would have checked that haughty rebellion which has so often led us to break the law of God. And if, for the time to come, we would persevere in loyalty to Him, we must humble ourselves, accept the sentence, and look on this present life as a path to the grave. The path may be long or short; but to the tomb it must lead us. Remembering this, we shall see all things in their true light. We shall love that God who has deigned to set His heart on us notwithstanding our being creatures of death: we shall hate, with deepest contrition, the insolence and ingratitude wherewith we have spent so many of our few days of life, that is, in sinning against our heavenly Father: and we shall be not only willing, but eager, to go through these days of penance, which He so mercifully gives us for making reparation to His offended justice.

— Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year: “Ash Wednesday”

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“INFORMATION Operations and its subset PSYOPs, mind-superiority or information confrontation are actively being used by all sides in the emerging great war of continents. Unfortunately, for us civilians busy with daily routines and jobs, in modern 21st century mind wars, civilians are the targets of these operations. Our minds are battlefields whether we recognize it or not and whether we have adequate means of defense or not.

“Civilians are targeted in Western democracies because they elect the lawmakers, the people that determine foreign policy. The most unfortunate thing about this situation is that most western democracies haven’t caught up with this new mode of warfare and the citizens of western countries are largely left to their own for defending their minds against military-grade, psychological attacks that most might not even be aware is happening to them.

“Now that we know how Russia, China and the United States define Information Operations and the importance they assign to it, we are going to look at why it is employed. That is, what are the geopolitical objectives information operations are employed to achieve, specifically with respect to Russia?”

—- 21st Century Mindwars

ALAN writes:

Here is a good illustration of how some American women helped to advance the Permanent Leftist Revolution.

In 1972, Cynthia Larson, 19, was hired by a private company to work as a “Santa’s helper” in a shopping center in Ames, Iowa. Was she content with that job? Not at all. What she wanted was to be Santa Claus, not “Santa’s helper.”

[UPI, “Woman Wants Santa Claus Job, But Company Won’t Hire Her,” The Raleigh (West Virginia) Register, Nov. 27, 1972]

Evidently the company looked upon that idea as absurd, which of course it was. They refused to accept her application to work as Santa Claus. But did that stop young Cynthia? Not at all.

Christmas is far from the mind at the moment, but the cause espoused by Larson, we live with every single day.

That Cynthia and her Libber-comrades got their way in American life — at the expense of the rights of business owners and to the benefit of increasingly powerful central government — was less a result of the Women’s Lib movement than of inaction and acquiescence by millions of Americans who opposed that movement, and especially of widespread abdication by American white men of their proper patriarchal authority. Such men proved thereby how easily they could be induced to surrender their rights.

Larson grew up in the Revolutionary 1960s and, like millions of other young women who served as cannon fodder for the Permanent Leftist Revolution, she absorbed the vocabulary and ideology of “Liberals” who claimed that “discrimination” was unspeakably evil and “non-discrimination” unqualifiedly good. Their role in the Revolution was not to think but to absorb and recite slogans. She may not have been a witting agent of that Revolution, but young women like her were just as useful. Read More »

A TRAIN on the Norfolk Southern line that was carrying large quantities of hazardous chemicals, including vinyl chloride, derailed a week ago in East Palestine, Ohio and some say the extent of the disaster is being covered up. The chemicals apparently were drained from the trains and then set on fire for disposal, causing toxic clouds for hundreds of miles. Whether calling it a “Chernobyl-like” catastrophe (see video) is alarmism, I cannot say, but caution against rushing to conclusions or dismissing the seriousness of the story.

A comment found here:

So, ya. I can confirm the massive budget cuts at Norfolk Southern being a likely cause of this. My brother worked for them as the railroad equivalent of a mechanic and got laid off about three years ago due to the railroad adopting a “precision railroading” policy. To very quickly simplify the policy, the idea is to cut jobs within the company by the thousands, removing mechanics, track repairmen, general maintenance, and even engineers who ran the trains, while also adding too many cars to the trains and simply not working on engines or cars when they needed repairs and simply doing the absolute bare minimum to maintain a “functional” railroad. Read More »

THE Tin Pan Alley Composer Joe Burke (1884–1950) wrote this love song, “Dear One.” It was performed and recorded by Henry Burr in 1925.

It’s a pleasant, sentimental Valentine’s Day tune.

Recording courtesy of Library of Congress

Pair of Lovers, 1480

SOME St. Valentine’s Day wisdom from Dawn Eden, author of The Thrill of the Chaste:

Human beings are created for bonding, and we attain our individual empowerment — I would prefer to say flourishing — to the extent that we are able to actualize our full potential in society. For that reason, the sexual revolution has disempowered women, because it has fed them the lie that they will gain power to the extent that they are atomized — removed from the so-called dependence of husband and children.

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bashi-Bazouk,” 1868

THE METROPOLITAN Museum of Art in New York City is a magnificent temple to art. Its immense galleries celebrate through painstaking preservation and exhibition the best of cultures around the world, offering the chance to explore and gain understanding of Ancient Egypt, Africa, Asia, Islam, Ancient Greece and Rome, and, of course, various ages of European civilization. You will not find anywhere in the non-Western world more sensitivity to and respect for the artistic efforts of distant strangers and races. The artworks in the museum’s collections also include many great works by Europeans depicting and often valorizing foreign cultures, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme’s “Bashi-Bazouk,” shown above.

However, a new exhibit at the museum condemns the culture that produced such a museum and its rich diversity. Heather Mac Donald writes at City Journal:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct.

Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

I highly recommend Mac Donald’s excellent article in its entirety.

This kind of exhibit, nothing more really than bitterly ugly, Communist-style agitprop, is not surprising of course, but still it’s depressing. The great museums of this country are destined for erasure. They will be obliterated in the flames of resentment and envy. Where truth is not, beauty cannot long survive. Read More »

IN HONOR of black history month, I recommend another essay by the late Elizabeth Wright, who wrote profiles of many successful black businessmen of the pre-civil rights era:

Like so many men of his era, Charles Henry Douglass seized opportunities when they came, and created them when they didn’t. Confident, enterprising and imaginative, he was perfectly matched for the world of business.

His career as a businessman, in Macon, Georgia, spanned 1898 to 1940, as he successfully weathered even the stock market crash of 1929. In the course of those years, he owned or leased close to 100 properties, along with restaurants, saloons, two movie theaters and a hotel.

He was president of the Middle Georgia Savings & Investment Co. for eight years, afterward serving as a director. Early in his career, he had bought shares in this bank (when it was the Georgia Loan & Savings Co.). It is also the place where he met the bank’s cashier, Fannie Appling, who was to become his wife. Respected as one of the black community’s most prosperous and influential citizens, he was credited with helping the city of Macon enlarge its business life.

Who was Douglass? He was a man whose mother and father died when he was barely out of his teens, leaving him to figure out how to support his two younger sisters. With only a rural elementary school education, he became an agricultural laborer. He held his next job, as a carriage driver for a doctor, while also working at a candy manufacturing plant. He managed to support the family until the mid-1890s, when both sisters married. Douglass then left Macon for more profitable work in another city. There, he saved money and returned to Macon in 1898, with $24 to spare.

With this, he bought a partnership in a small bicycle repair and rental business. Thus began a brilliant business career, to which he applied his savvy and intelligence. About the bicycle business, he said, “I did fairly well until the automobile craze came, then I sold out and went into the hotel and real estate business, in which I prospered.” Read More »

LIKE most modern words, “Heresy” is used both vaguely and diversely. It is used vaguely because the modern mind is as averse to precision in ideas as it is enamored of precision in measurement. It is used diversely because, according to the man who uses it, it may represent any one of fifty things.

Today, with most people (of those who use the English language), the word “Heresy” connotes bygone and forgotten quarrels, an old prejudice against rational examination. Heresy is therefore thought to be of no contemporary interest. Interest in it is dead, because it deals with matter no one now takes seriously. It is understood that a man may interest himself in a heresy from archaeological curiosity, but if he affirm that it has been of great effect on history and still is, today, of living contemporary moment, he will be hardly understood.

Yet the subject of heresy in general is of the highest importance to the individual and to society, and heresy in its particular meaning (which is that of heresy in Christian doctrine) is of special interest for anyone who would understand Europe: the character of Europe and the story of Europe.

— Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (Sheed and Ward, 1938)

THE FATHER of 14-year-old Adriana Kuch, who killed herself after being attacked by black students in the hallway of a New Jersey high school, complains of protests by her peers.

His initial reaction was harsher:

Outraged by the school’s lack-luster response, Michael seethed to NBC New York – slamming the institution that his daughter attended.

‘A kid is assaulted with a weapon and their policy is not to call the police or file a report,’ he said to the broadcaster.

He then wrote about the vicious attack on his Facebook calling the attack ‘planned.’

‘These four girls planned and executed an attack. If you watch the videos I have, they are laughing while talking about what they are going to do at the start of the video,’ he wrote.

The tragic suicide of this young girl, who obviously had other problems but was reportedly kind and thoughtful, is emblematic of the moral suicide of the white race, which has surrendered itself to decadent guilt, political vanity and cultural self-erasure.

As for this school, I feel sorry for every single student. What a rotten place. It’s no wonder that non-white students pumped with vile racial hatred almost every day would attack a white girl with fists and racial slurs.

TROLLING through the archives, I found a 2015 post about Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois — food for thought this Black History Month. But I was especially drawn to the remarks of  commenter Renée from View from the Right:

I am a (mostly) black woman who has white relatives and grew up in a predominately white Midwestern town. I went east to a very liberal college. Nothing prepared me for white liberal students’ need to verify that I was a victim of racism at every turn, and that I felt blacks were being kept out. There were very few blacks at this school, most of them slightly conservative, and we all agreed on one thing: the reason there were so few blacks there was that a school practically in the wilderness with no business program could not attract a lot of blacks. The lack of blacks was not due to racism. No white liberal would believe me on this point. I was constantly asked what it was like to be a black at this school and whether I felt uncomfortable around so many whites. I quickly learned to avoid white people obsessed with the black experience. They were only interested in being entertained by me (they would compare the black students to each other and favor those who were the most ‘hood) or in finding in me an object for their paternalism. Many blacks did not see through this. Read More »