Children on the Beach, Winslow Homer

“True simplicity is like that of children, who think, speak and act candidly and without craftiness. They believe whatever is told them; they have no care or thought for themselves, especially when with their parents; they cling to them, without going to seek their own satisfactions and consolations, which they take in good faith and enjoy with simplicity, without any curiosity about their causes and effects.”

—  St. Francis de Sales

IN 2011, Monika Schaefer, a violinist from Jasper, Canada and a former candidate for the liberal Green Party, began researching the events of 9/11. Her world was turned upside down when she discovered that the official narrative of that fateful day was not true and so troubled was she by the Green Party’s neglect of the issue she resigned.

A short time later, prompted by this discovery, she started researching the most famous event of World War II. The result was her video in the summer of 2016 titled, “Sorry, Mom, I Was Wrong about the Holocaust.” The video, a public apology to her deceased German mother for accusing her of being complicit in genocide, instantly went viral and was quickly censored on Youtube and social media.

The personal fallout was immense. The “inclusive” community of Jasper, where Schaefer had been well-liked and active as an artist and volunteer for over 30 years, turned out to be not that inclusive after all. She was harassed on the streets, barred from public venues and lost all of her private violin students. An unknown person wrote a wild, ranting letter in her name to all the businesses in town, portraying her as a disturbed bigot. The police refused to look into this forgery.

But things only got worse when Schaefer, 58, was arrested in January of 2018 while on a Christmas trip to Germany for making the video. She was formally charged with “incitement of the people.” She then spent ten months in a maximum security prison in Munich.

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, readers might consider buying her engaging new book, which bears the same title as her video and in which she recounts these harrowing events. Read More »

“MARY was made Mother of God to obtain salvation for many who, on account of their wicked lives, could not be saved according to the rigor of Divine justice, but might be saved with the help of her sweet mercy and powerful intercession.”

– St. John Chrysostom

FOR every one dollar of new wealth earned by a person in the bottom 90 percent since 2020, a billionaire gained roughly $1.7 million. “Billionaire fortunes have increased by $2.7 billion a day,” according to a report by OXFAM.

Not since World War II have the top one percent so benefited from world events.

A deliberately contrived pandemic has led to a pandemic of organized theft. And, OXFAM wants to turn over a good portion of this wealth to the governments that are controlled by the robbers.

ALAN writes:

Eleven years ago, I wrote about the abandonment of the Cleveland High School building in south St. Louis. [“The Tale of One High School”, The Thinking Housewife, Jan. 18, 2012] It was a public high school. It has stood there for more than a hundred years, closed and abandoned since 2006.  Its huge size and architectural design and craftsmanship create the impression of a castle.  That—“The Castle”—is precisely what it was called and how it is remembered by generations of students who got a decent education there.

These two pictures appeared last week on a public Facebook page about St. Louis History.  They show the school’s auditorium and stage as they look today, replete with advanced deterioration and vandalism.  I give credit where credit is due:  Such things are a credit to the hard work, professional dedication, and inestimable moral fiber of the St. Louis Board of Education and municipal government. (More on that subject below.)

I sat in this very auditorium on many days in 1966-’67.  I sat there during the week in January 1967 when three American astronauts died in a fire at Cape Kennedy.  During the lunch hour, the cliques and the in-crowd always congregated down front near the stage and whooped it up.  That was why I always selected a seat in the outer row and near the back of the auditorium, just outside the view in these pictures.  I was not part of any in-crowd.  I tried to get as far away from them as I could in order to be able to read in what little quiet I could find.

I distinctly remember sitting there during the noon hour and reading books about aviation and science (books of my own choosing, not schoolbooks).  Pilot Dale Titler’s Wings of Mystery: True Stories of Aviation History was one of them.  I sent him a letter to express my appreciation for his book.  He replied, and then we exchanged a few more letters.

Imagine living down the street today from a huge building boarded-up and in this condition. When we were in parochial school in the late 1950s-early ‘60s, my classmate and boyhood best friend Jeff’s family lived across the street from Cleveland High. He and I walked past it countless times. We never paid any attention to it because it was just there. There was nothing about it that compelled our attention.  In a neighborhood and at a time when men and women accepted their responsibilities instead of rejecting or evading them, it was an ordinary high school. It did not stand out. The men (not feminists) who ran it kept it clean and functional, as did those who worked in it.

Students were encouraged to take part in after-school activities and they did. A variety of clubs for students endured for decades.

In a 2009 article about such clubs, historian NiNi Harris wrote:

“Two of the after school clubs—the Radio Club and the Rifle Club—are almost inconceivable in today’s climate”. 

[“After School at the Castle”, Carondelet Historical Society Newsletter, Winter 2009, p. 4]

That seems a fair statement. But “today’s climate” would seem inconceivable to Cleveland students and teachers in the 1950s. Nor could they have imagined a School Board so stupid, so unaccountable, or so incompetent as to permit their school to deteriorate into the abomination shown in the two pictures above, or a city of taxpayers who would permit them to do that, or a city whose “law enforcement” and courts are so bent-over-backward lenient as to reward criminals and impel tens of thousands of law-abiding residents to move away as fast as they can.

In the Rifle Clubs, students (i.e., white boys and girls) used rifles to practice marksmanship in the basement.  But neither they nor those evil guns left it looking as it does in those pictures.

For contrast, see the photo below that appeared in the 1964 yearbook.  It is the same stage in the same auditorium.

1957 Cleveland High School yearbook

The Cleveland building does not stand out today, either — because buildings like it have become an ordinary sight in a neighborhood infested with crime in a city that is now in free-fall because of corrupt and wholly unaccountable city government.

Massimo Stanzione, Saint Agnes

Let this maiden, Agnes, convicted of sacrilege and blasphemy against the gods, be stripped and led thus to be exposed in the place of shame.

                    — Symphronius, a Roman magistrate, in 304 A.D.

“AS Agnes concluded her prayer the flames subsided, leaving her untouched, and the holy virgin remained unmoved, prepared for the next act of barbarity which the fiendish mob around should prepare for her. Their fury and hatred were in no degree lessened by the last phase of their cruelty. The yells, Death to the sorceress! Destruction to the Christians! were again caught up. They re-echoed through the palatial halls around the square. Aspasius was nervous and embarrassed. He felt that the mob was well-nigh beyond control. To postpone the sentence was out of the question, and yet they had been so often baffled that he feared a fresh failure and a renewed outbreak on the part of the populace. Meanwhile the demands for the virgin s blood grew fiercer, and the judge, fearing for his own safety, called upon a lictor to put her to the sword.

“Whatever may have been the feelings of the executioner, he had no option but to obey his instructions.

“He stepped forward with a show of boldness to the spot where the maiden was still standing. At his approach she fell upon her knees, her eyes turned towards heaven.”

— Aloysius J. Smith, Life of St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr, 1906

See prayers and devotions to St. Agnes

Prayer in Honor of St. Agnes

O Sweetest Lord Jesus Christ, source of all virtues, lover of virgins, most powerful conqueror of demons, most severe extirpator of vice! deign to cast Thine eyes upon my weakness, and through the intercession of Mary most blessed, Mother and Virgin, and of Thy beloved spouse St. Agnes, glorious virgin and martyr, grant me the aid of Thy heavenly grace, in order that I may learn to despise all earthly things, and to love what is heavenly; to oppose vice and to be proof against temptation; to walk firmly in the path of virtue, not to seek honors, to shun pleasures, to bewail my past offenses, to keep far from the occasions of evil, to keep free from bad habits, to seek the company of the good, and persevere in righteousness, so that, by the assistance of Thy grace, I may deserve the crown of eternal life, together with St. Agnes and all the saints, forever and ever, in Thy kingdom. Amen.

(Indulgence 100 days, Pius IX, 1854)

Moon Madness, Andrew Wyeth, 1982

ANXIETY is different from ordinary care and concern about tasks that need our attention. Anxiety is fixation, an obsessed determination to overcome difficulties quickly and a rehearsing of the bad possibilities in our minds. At root, it is an excessive desire to be free of the evils and hardships of the world and a lack of confidence in Providence. Anxiety is inner turbulence that wrecks lives.

The reflection of the moon cannot be seen on the surface of stormy waters. The good cannot be seen on the surface of an anxious soul. God dwells in calm.

St. Francis de Sales was a scientist of anxiety and other spiritual afflictions. Here briefly are some insights from his Introduction to the Devout Life:

We must treat of our affairs with diligence, but without eagerness or solicitude.

That care and diligence wherewith we ought to attend to our affairs must never be confounded with anxiety and solicitude. The angels are careful of our salvation, and procure it with diligence, yet they are never agitated either by anxiety or solicitude; for care and diligence naturally result from their charity, whereas solicitude and anxiety are utterly incompatible with their felicity; because the former may be accompanied by a calm and tranquil state of mind, whereas the latter never can. Read More »

THE LIONIZING of the recently deceased “Pope” Benedict XVI continues apace.

Conservatives indulge the fantasy that the erudite Joseph Ratzinger, who was under suspicion of heresy by the Holy Office under Pope Pius XII, was the ideological antithesis of the blabby, openly Marxist Frank Bergoglio, whose apostasy is difficult to ignore. Ratzinger was supposedly striving to preserve tradition, rather than engaging in his own classy form of demolition.

The two, in fact, constituted a synthesis. The aim of the One World Religion has always been to appear non-exclusive, including even “rigid” traditionalists under its umbrella.

“It is never advisable to die as the former head of a false religion,” writes Dr. Thomas Droleskey of Benedict in a three-part series that examines Ratzinger, the shameless, “cultured” revolutionary:

Joseph Alois Ratzinger/Benedict XVI was a “cultured” heretic as opposed to the vulgar heretic from Argentina, Jorge Mario Bergoglio … Ratzinger/Benedict used pseudo-intellectualism to obfuscate what is clear and to make it appear as though almost everything about the Holy Faith was subject to skepticism, doubt, and re-examination. He used subtlety and a cloud of murky linguistics to deny Our Lord’s Bodily Resurrection from the dead and his deliberate use of imprecise terminology cast doubt upon Our Lord’s Real Presence in the Most Blessed Sacrament and even the existence of Purgatory.

Ratzinger employed “subtlety and a cloud of murky linguistics” where his partner in crime employs scattershot insults and reckless blasphemies.

THE ABSURDITY of the National Debt, by Hastings Russell, the 12th Duke of Bedford, was written in 1947. Nothing has changed in terms of public understanding of national indebtedness either here or in England since then; things have only gotten worse.

An excerpt:

The National Debt started in 1694, when the Government of the day unwisely arranged that a private syndicate, which later became known as the “Bank of England,” should lend it £1,200,000 in gold, at 8% interest. With even greater stupidity, they then allowed the syndicate to issue bank notes to the value of £1,200,000 which it was able to lend into circulation, charging interest. Thus, although the Bank of England was not put to any expense beyond the cost of the paper and printing, it was allowed to draw interest on two lots of money—its own gold and the new notes to the value of the gold! Later, the Bank of England managed to obtain still more gold which they also lent to the Government at interest, and, whenever they did so, they increased their issue of virtually costless paper money until they were getting interest on £16 millions in gold and £16 millions in paper notes. If the Government had done the obviously sensible thing and, instead of borrowing, had decided to issue its own paper money, it could likewise have done so at the mere cost of paper and printing; there would have been no need for interest to be paid to anybody; and the taxpayer would not have been burdened to provide interest.

[…]

“…. the power of people of all classes to buy and enjoy the goods and services which either were produced or could have been produced, was diminished by the vastly increased taxation. Rich people had to pay far more in super-tax. Poor people had to pay more in “indirect taxation.” (Indirect taxation means Customs and Excise dues on imported goods, which add to the price of the latter and increase the amount of money which purchasers, including the poor have to pay in order to obtain them.) Read More »

 THE COVID vaccine narrative in the mainstream media is flipping.

Don’t be fooled. These revelations, while true, are planned and coordinated.

See also: “Dr. Aseem Malhotra on the BBC: Hero or Controlled Opposition?”

“… IT is necessary to counteract US Atlanticist geopolitics at all levels and in all regions of the world, trying to weaken, demoralize, deceive and, ultimately, defeat the enemy as much as possible. It is especially important to bring geopolitical turmoil into the US domestic reality by encouraging all kinds of separatism, various ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements of extremist, racist and sectarian groups that destabilize internal political processes in the USA. At the same time, it makes sense to support isolationist tendencies in US politics, the theses of those (often right-wing Republican) circles that believe that the US should confine itself to its domestic problems.”

—    Alexander Dugin, Foundations of Geopolitics (1997):Pg. 358

How many of the top figures in “the alt-right” are taking part in Russian psychological operations in this country? For instance, six of the popular figures at Charlottesville had ties to Russia.

See Hijacking Reality: The Mind Wars of 2015-2022.

“Information Operations is defined as the integrated employment of: electronic warfare, computer network operations, psychological operations, military deception and security operations. Psychological operations uses information to influence peoples’ emotions, motives, objective reasoning and behavior favorable to the people carrying out the operation.

“In social media information operations campaigns, one simply cannot rely on organic growth to promote (dis)information. You need intelligence assets, such as digital influencers to push the desired narrative. They can be dumb and pretty while reading from a script, or they can also be extremely intelligent and pretty or not so pretty freestyling according to a certain narrative as long as they are convincing to an audience regarding the desired narrative. Yet, that is also not enough. You also need IO/PSYOP software. You need the database of thousands of datapoints for each of the hundreds of millions of Americans. You need bots to push the influencers and narratives to the top of feeds to create buzz and give the view the information is popular and almost by consequence legitimate.”

The Internet is a treasure of useful information and great books, but it is also an arena of high-level, cognitive combat. Intelligence agencies and psychological experts are messing with your mind. They’re “shaping reality.” Donald Trump, Michael Flynn, Alex Jones, Charlottesville, Jan. 6, Q-Anon, Pizzagate, George Floyd — the psyops are endless. They’re not all coming from Russia, but some of them are.

Source

Source

“I CANNOT believe I am dying a horrible agonizing death for trying to do the right thing by society. I cannot believe even more that after a lifetime of knowing me, just about everyone who used to love & value me have abandoned me to my fate over the politicization of the reason.”

— Mike O’Mara

“MOST Americans aren’t the sort of citizens the Founding Fathers expected; they are contented serfs. Far from being active critics of government, they assume that its might makes it right.”

— Joseph Sobran

More here.