[Reposted]

IN 1994, black journalist Elizabeth Wright examined the story of the late-nineteenth century Chicago caterer, Charles Smiley. He was so successful that in 1893 he constructed a large, three-story stone mansion (below) to house his business, complete with a dining room and ballroom. Smiley was a head of the Chicago chapter of the National Negro Business League, founded by Booker T. Washington in 1900 with financing by Andrew Carnegie.

According to Wright, black businessmen like Smiley were held back not so much by legal discrimination as by black leaders who refused to encourage a separate black economy and looked down upon manual labor:

Take Chicago in the late 19th century, for instance, where the doctrine of self-help was vigorously promoted by black businessmen. While such men emphasized the importance of business enterprise as the path to increased affluence and self-respect, other prominent blacks just as vigorously discouraged the creation of any black institutions.

Among the city’s most successful entrepreneurs was Charles Smiley, who owned the dominant catering business in Chicago and its suburbs. So respected was he for his outstanding professionalism that the demand for his services reached even into the adjacent states of Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan.

Smiley was actually following in the footsteps of many black men throughout the country who made fortunes through their skillful management and promotion of the catering trade. When he arrived in Chicago as a young man, in 1881, with little formal education and 50 cents in his pocket, he took a job as a janitor, and used his spare time to hire himself out as a waiter at catered dinners and parties. As he developed contacts among wealthy Chicagoans, he saw the possibility of these people becoming clients of his own catering business.

Well-disciplined from a youth spent as a laborer, Smiley began his business on a shoestring. Booker T. Washington was to later say about this period in Smiley’s life, “He possessed, however, several assets more valuable than mere money. He had a resolute character, good powers of observation, ambition, and brains.” (more…)

  

FROM Thuletide: Third World immigrants make a net-negative lifetime financial contribution in the West (see here), but so do women, even though their workforce participation rate is only slightly lower than men's. "The positive net fiscal impact women make from 45-59 never outweighs the prior negative net fiscal impacts." The Girlboss Industrial Complex has achieved nothing other than halving men's wages, taking women away from their children, and preventing people from starting families. Source: The Distribution of Income and Fiscal Incidence by Age and Gender: Some Evidence from New Zealand (2013)  

FROM The Broadstone of Honor or, The true sense and practice of chivalry: by Kenelm Henry Digby (1876): NOW, the religion of chivalry was altogether the religion of motives and of the heart. It was love, faith, hope, gratitude, joy, fidelity, honour, mercy; it was a devotion of mind and strength, of the whole man, of his soul and body, to the discharge of duty, and to the sacrifice of every selfish and dishonourable feeling that was contrary; it was to obey a commandment which was in unison with all the elevated sentiments of nature, and calculated most effectually to develop every quality that was the object of esteem and reverence. The knights of old had neither the inclination nor the ingenuity to determine the minimum of love which was compatible with the faith of Christ. They were not like men who regard it sufficient if they love God at any time before death, or on the festivals; or if they keep the commandments and do not hate God; or who imagine that this burdensome obligation of loving him was part of the Mosaic law, which is dispensed with by the religion of nature and the Gospel. They had not learned to reason with the sophist of old, saying that religion "is a gracious and an excellent thing when moderately pursued in youth; but if afterwards it be loved overmuch, it is the ruin of men." They had not subsided…

Bethlehem, of noblest cities None can once with thee compare; Thou alone the Lord from heaven Didst for us Incarnate bear. Fairer than the sun at morning Was the star that told his birth; To the lands their God announcing, Hid beneath a form of earth. By its lambent beauty guided, See, the Eastern Kings appear; See them bend, their gifts to offer, Gifts of incense, gold, and myrrh. Offerings of mystick meaning! Incense doth the God disclose; Gold a Royal child proclaimeth; Myrrh a future tomb foreshows. Holy Jesu! in thy brightness To the Gentile world display’d! With the Father, and the Spirit, Endless praise to Thee be paid.   

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 [Reposted] HOW IS it that middle class families have gone in the last five decades from being sustainable on one income to requiring two in many cases? Why in the same period has household debt grown ever higher? You would think we would have less debt, not more. This 2019 video discussion between two Australians, Will Waite and Chas Pinwill, explains why working mothers (war and high immigration too) are a necessity in a debt-based, central banking economy and why personal indebtedness only grows worse. Everything they say about Australia is relevant to the U.S. They discuss the "social credit" alternative (not to be confused with Chinese social credit scoring) in which every adult receives a national dividend, similar to workers in profit-sharing companies. The dividend would offset the lack of money in circulation despite growths in productivity in a high-tech age and would provide enough to support families and individuals. "We've gone from a situation of single income to double income but we're not any richer, because all the second income ... goes to paying the mortgage. So the banks have done bloody well. They've got us in a deeper grip than ever. And we think we're getting richer because house prices are going up but they're only going up because they're lending money to everybody to bid against each other," says Pinwill, a cattleman who brings earthy wisdom to the subject. Major banks and large corporations push feminism,…

A READER writes: I used the living wage calculator for my city. With two adults, one working, three children, I barely make the living wage with my job ~$84k (wage calculator says $83,416). This requires me to work offshore and be away from my family half the year. I also have baby number four on the way next week so even though I make good money I still will not be making a living wage. The one big category I noticed that was absent from the typical expenses, which are pretty spot on, was savings. Try and save for retirement or an emergency fund and your money goes by even quicker. This is also with having no car notes and comparatively low credit card debt. We still find expenses tight sometimes especially with hospital bills for the new baby coming up. I barely manage to stay afloat I’m not sure how everyone else is doing it when I know they make considerably less than me even with both parents working. Through high taxes, usury, offshoring, greedflation, our society really is the worst.  

IN HONOR of this beautiful occasion, the Feast of the Holy Family, here are some brutal truths affecting family life today as noted by Anthony Migchels:

Interest is being payed [sic] by people borrowing money and received by people having loads of it. So it is per definition a wealth transfer from poor to rich.

It transpires, that about 80% of the poorest people pay more interest than they receive to the richest 10%. The next richest 10% pay as much as they receive. This means the vast majority is losing a substantial part of their money to interest. The richest own the banks or have a lot of money there. (more…)

 A just society makes it possible for ordinary fathers to provide for their families. Even the ancients recognized this natural law, now buried by propaganda and false notions of equality which benefit the few over the many. The "living wage" supports a family in basic decency, health and modest comfort without onerous taxation and indebtedness. The "servile state" makes it impossible for one-income families to own property or even have enough for food. The economic underpinnings of the family have been decimated and systemic usury makes every single one of us, no matter how much personal debt we have, "interest slaves." The sad thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. There truly is enough for all. The usurers keep us distracted by stoking social conflict and pushing hedonism, to the further ruin of family happiness. Unleashed sexual desire is deliberately used for political control. Pornography is the slave's compensation. It doesn't have to be this way. There truly is enough for all. God didn't create the family without also giving the means to support it. Even the birds in the field have been given enough by their loving Father.  

Perfection consists in doing the will of God, not in understanding His designs. -- Reverend Jean-Pierre de Caussade S.J.  

An inspiring sermon by Saint John Marie Vianney for the Feast of the Holy Family.  

 "IT is still a strange story, though an old one, how they came out of orient lands, crowned with the majesty of kings and clothed with something of the mystery of magicians. That truth that is tradition has wisely remembered them almost as unknown quantities, as mysterious as their mysterious and melodious names; Melchior, Caspar, Balthazar. But there came with them all that world of wisdom that had watched the stars in Chaldea and the sun in Persia; and we shall not be wrong if we see in them the same curiosity that moves all the sages.They would stand for the same human ideal if their names had really been Confucius or Pythagoras or Plato. They were those who sought not tales, but the truth of things; and since their truth was itself a thirst for God, they also have had their reward." --- G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man (Ignatius Press; p. 176)  

THE sudden death of 34-year-old Victor Simoes has been confirmed by medical testing to have been caused by one Pfizer COVID shot. Simoes was healthy, but collapsed 16 days after receiving the shot. His mother, Henrietta Simoes, describes the profound and permanent effects on the family in another Children's Health Defense interview. When Henrietta reported her son's death to the CDC's Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), no one from the CDC called her. She complained about this lack of response and then received two condolence letters from the government agency. One letter said the vaccine was safe and effective. The other suggested she seek counseling.  



ANOTHER great interview from Children's Health Defense: Gail Macrae was a nurse in a San Francisco area hospital during the height of the reported pandemic in 2020. She said her hospital was virtually empty and so were those of acquaintances working elsewhere in the state when television news was reporting they were overwhelmed. She said prohibiting family members from visiting hospitalized relatives was a "crime against humanity." Refusing steroids and administering Remdesivir, in keeping with government protocols, doomed many patients. "Every day I felt I was violating my oath of office," she said. The honesty and moral outrage in these interviews -- the very antithesis of the slick, manipulative COVID propaganda that traumatized and radicalized millions of people -- are nothing short of beautiful and inspiring.  

"THE first end I propose in our daily work is to do the will of God; secondly, to do it in the manner He wills it; and thirdly to do it because it is His will." ----- St. Elizabeth Ann Seton