“IT is imperative to guarantee that women have autonomy in deciding their preference of having children, based on their own convictions, free from any intervention or pressure from the government,” the Republican nominee’s wife writes, amid a campaign in which Donald Trump’s threats to women’s reproductive rights have played a central role.

“Why should anyone other than the woman herself have the power to determine what she does with her own body? A woman’s fundamental right of individual liberty, to her own life, grants her the authority to terminate her pregnancy if she wishes.

“Restricting a woman’s right to choose whether to terminate an unwanted pregnancy is the same as denying her control over her own body. I have carried this belief with me throughout my entire adult life.”

— Melania Trump Read More »

“SOMETIMES, when I read spiritual treatises, in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles in the way and a host of illusions round it, my poor little mind grows very soon weary. I close the learned book, which leaves my head muddled and my heart parched, and I take up the Holy Scripture. Then all seems luminous, a single word opens up infinite horizons to my soul, perfection seems easy; I see it is enough to realize one’s nothingness and give oneself wholly, like a child, into the arms of the good God.”

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux

“Understand that to love Jesus, to be His victim of love, the weaker one is, without desires or virtues, the more apt one is for the operations of that transforming and consuming Love. The desire to be a victim is enough of itself, but one must consent to stay always poor and without strength, and that’s the difficulty, for where are we to find the truly poor in spirit? He must be sought afar, says the psalmist. He does not say we must look for him among great souls, but ‘afar,’ that is in lowliness and nothingness. Ah! do let us stay very far from all that is brilliant, let us love our littleness, love to feel nothing, then we shall be poor in spirit, and Jesus will come for us, far off as we are, He will transform us in love’s flames.”

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux

IN 1976, 40 percent of all jobs paid enough to support a family of five. Today, the “living wage” is a pipe dream for most families.

And no one in national politics is advocating for the financial welfare of the traditional family despite its proven benefits to society as a whole.

FOR those who rush to the conclusion that Hurricane Helene was somehow caused either by weather engineers in the government (conservatives) or by global warming (liberals), I urge you to examine some of the storms of the past. Both these scenarios can’t withstand serious consideration.

Hazel (1954 — made landfall in North Carolina as a Category 4; killed 175 in the U.S. and caused the highest wind ever recorded in Philadelphia), Agnes (1972 — more than 43,000 structures were destroyed or severely damaged in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; the city of Wilkes Barre, Pa. never fully recovered), Hugo (1989 — with extensive damage to South Carolina and North Carolina), Floyd (1999 — with 105 mph winds when it made landfall at Cape Fear, NC) and Sandy (2012 — with serious inland damage as far north as New England) — these are some of the hurricanes of the past.

The science for creating and directing major hurricanes is very unlikely. Not that weather engineering doesn’t exist, but this kind of storm involves massive atmospheric systems and trillions of tons of water. It’s beyond human intelligence and means. Real life is not like the recent movie Twisters, where a super-cool and extremely pretty meteorologist is able to calm immense winds by pushing a few buttons. If things were that simple, many of us would have been blown away by now after those dastardly weather schemers sent winds into our communities.

The damage in some cases (I’m not referring to the latest in the Smokey Mountains) is caused by human beings who build in areas prone to flooding or build inadequate levees or dams.

The most amazing thing about the weather is how it follows certain regular laws, even during what to us are catastrophes. This regularity of a vast system of winds and waters, so complex human beings despite eons of study still struggle to make accurate predictions let alone control it, and the fact that we are not all swirled into the void by high winds, are signs of our Creator’s providential care. The weather itself is proof of an Intelligence that governs all. We are subject to a fallen creation, but even so the hurricane, tropical storm and tornado are the exceptions. The sun comes out the next day. Though we should be compassionate after a major storm, where is the gratitude for the thousands of days without major storms?

Here’s a good comment for those in the “catastrophic global warming” category from Spiked:

Each year, hurricane forecasters issue their annual predictions for the Atlantic hurricane season. This year, with the Earth experiencing a temperature spike, there was near unanimity among forecasters that the Atlantic would experience a remarkable jump in hurricane activity, with one news outlet saying this would be a ‘supercharged’ hurricane season. However, the reality thus far, with two-thirds of the season behind us, is that it has been no more eventful than average. Meanwhile, activity in the world’s other oceans has been uniformly low. So much for ‘supercharged’ hurricanes. Read More »

Read More »

Mother Feeding Child, Mary Cassatt

FROM “Forced Labor: What’s Wrong with Balancing Work and Family” by Brian C. Robertson (Spence Publishing, 2002):

“The satisfactions of motherhood have little to do with ego-gratification or the pleasure derived from seeing the immediate results of one’s toil; they are, rather, the satisfactions of complete self-giving to a totally dependent creature. A society that measures success exclusively in terms of material or professional attainment is unlikely to accord much status to the hidden work of the mother in the home. More likely to value the mother’s unique contributions is a culture whose ideal is self-giving, be it the sometimes monotonous, consistent toil of the breadwinner borne for the sake of the family or the same toil borne at home for the same reason. It is not mere coincidence that a society in which the predominant view of work was Catherine Beecher’s “self-sacrificing labor of the stronger and wiser members [of the family] to raise the weaker and more ignorant to equal advantages” venerated the mother at home, while a society that views work as a means of self-aggrandizement holds her in contempt.

“A good mother must have total devotion to her work, but not because of the prospect of payback in the form of immediate results or pecuniary reward. The accomplishments of a day’s work of mothering are impossible to quantify and will only manifest themselves, possibly, in the distant future. The truth that civilization itself depends on such intangibles only underscores the fact that the goals involved in the work of parenting are much more remote and less susceptible to analysis based on results than are the market-oriented goals of professional or wage work. The product of a mother’s work is not a project or a paper, but a person, with his or her own personality, temperament, and free will. Read More »

“WHAT are the nefarious consequences of the artificial limitations and subsequent misdirectioning which the current financial system imposes on our economic activities? They are legion: the instability of the business cycle, constant inflation (mostly cost-push, but also demand-pull), the misuse of economic resources, economic inefficiency, waste, and sabotage alongside forced economic growth, an ever-increasing mountain of societal debt that is, in the aggregate, unrepayable, recurring financial crises, heavy and often increasing taxation, wage and debt-slavery, servility, the usurpation of the unearned increment of association by the private banking system, the centralization of economic wealth, privilege, and power in fewer and fewer hands, forced migration, cultural dislocation, unnecessary stresses and strains, social conflict, environmental degradation, and international economic conflict leading to war, etc., etc.”

— Oliver Heydorn of the Clifford Hugh Douglas Institute

I DON’T LIKE to watch TV news about devastating storms because there’s so much hype and distortion, but I found this video that gives you an idea of the damage of the recent hurricane that swept the Southeast.

So sad to see these areas and the people affected and to think how difficult it will be for them to rebuild.

Read More »

“COMPARED with ours how calm and how luminous is the knowledge of pure spirits [i.e., angels]! They are not doomed to the intricate discoursings of our reason, which runs after the truth, composes and analyzes, and laboriously draws conclusions from premises. They instantaneously apprehend the whole compass of primary truths. Their intuition is so prompt, that it is impossible for them to be surprised. as we are, into error. If they deceive themselves it must be of their own will. The perfection of their will is equal to the perfection of their intellect. They know not what it is to be disturbed by the violence of appetites. Their love is without emotion; and their hatred of evil is as calm and as wisely tempered as their love. A will so free can know no perplexity as to its aims, no inconstancy in its resolutions. Whereas with us long and anxious meditation is necessary before we make a decision, it is the property of the angels to determine by a single act the object of their choice. God proposed to them, as He does to us, infinite beatitude in the vision of His own Essence; and to fit them for so great an end, He endowed them with grace at the same time as He gave them being. In one instant they said Yes or No; in one instant they freely and deliberately decided their own fate.””

— Feast of the Dedication of St. Michael, The Liturgical Year 

ANOTHER white child is beaten up in a government school, this time in Mississippi. Will this boy ever be the same again?

Parents who live in all-white or mostly white neighborhoods generally don’t care about this kind of thing (that usually occurs in poorer areas.) When it comes to the victims of black cruelty, they have hearts of stone. The plight of white children who face aggression on a routine basis never moves them. One is tempted to believe they want young white children to be mauled to assuage their own un-Christian racial guilt.

Ironically, many blacks actually want whites to lead and defend their own societies — and to protect blacks from themselves. Read More »

“THERE has been maturing in the wishes and expectations of all the seditious members of society the advent of a certain universal republic which should be founded on the absolute equality of men and on community of goods, and in which there should no longer be national distinction, nor should any recognition be given to the authority of the father over his sons, nor of public power over the citizens, nor of God over men united in civil commonwealth. All of which things, should they become actual, would cause tremendous social convulsion, such as is now being experienced and felt…”

— Pope Benedict XV, Moto Proprio, Bonum et Sane, 1920

For the latest news on the Universal Republic, see “The Pact for the Future,” adopted by the United Nations last week. Notice that in this document the word “turbocharge” is used four times. In other words, the plan for the world republic known as Agenda 2030 is going to be accelerated dramatically from now on.

To sum up: Equality and peace will reign. Germs will be smashed. Poverty will be eliminated, along with the middle class. The oceans, the sun and the winds will obey the U.N. And every woman will be a man. Read More »

Mounted Indian Scout, Frederic Remington

FROM Jeff Fyn-Paul’s Not Stolen: The Truth About European Colonialism in the New World (Bombardier Books, 2023):

There is one small problem with [the] image of peace-loving Native American societies: it is completely untrue. Before the Spanish imposed peace on Amerindian tribes from California to Tierra del Fuego, the unrelenting reality of their lives was a Hobbesian war of all against all. (The parallel with Rome, which imposed a similar peace through violence on the Gauls and other tribal peoples of Western Europe, is striking in this regard.) Outside of a tiny area of city-states in Mesoamerica and the Andes, Native American societies were uniformly tribal chiefdoms. Wherever in the world such city-states and chiefdoms have arisen, warfare has been a continuous part of life. As a rule, the majority of males in chiefdoms are trained in the art of war; in city-state areas, elite males train in war while the rest of the males participate in agriculture or crafts that support the warrior elite.

There are very few general truths in the history of global civilization, but one of the most reliable is that in areas where rulers monopolize violence on a small scale, warfare, raiding, and slavery will be endemic. Steven Pinker calls this “the inescapable logic of anarchy.” Only modern-day first-world anarchists for whom war remains an abstraction—e.g., people such as Dave Graeber (whom we met in chapter 2)—would argue otherwise. General peace is only possible when strong rulers monopolize violence on a large scale; this is the only thing that has historically protected people from a near-continuous threat of localized raiding.

The prevalence of violence in tribal society was summarized in a recent interview with Korsai, one of the last Indigenous inhabitants of Papua New Guinea to give up his traditional ways of life. The interviewer noted that the village next to Korsai’s had been enticed by American missionaries to go and live in an apartment building in town. When asked whether he felt he was missing out on modern amenities by not going along with them, Korsai responded: ‘Not for long! Off our neighbours went, and we were left alone on the mountain. And we loved the missionaries—because they’d taken those neighbours away! We didn’t need to worry about being attacked anymore. Also, we didn’t have to get up in the night to attack them!’ Now the Yaifo women could go off to tend the gardens without fear; the gardens were expanded and no one ever went hungry; health dramatically improved. (pp. 164-165)

Further reflections on the peacefulness of the Native Americans can be found in this account of the life of St. Isaac Jogues and this description of his death: Read More »

“LET us love silence till the world is made to die in our hearts. Let us always remember death, and in this thought draw near to God in our heart, and the pleasures of this world will have our scorn.”

— St. Isaac Jogues

The Burning of Center Bridge, Edward Redfield

Now mostly unknown, copybook headings were short phrases written by teachers at the top of a piece of paper. These sentences were then copied by students, over and over, in order to improve their handwriting. Generally, these phrases were expressions of traditional wisdom about life.  Things that teachers could easily convey to students and ideally, might inspire them to work harder or be better. (Source)

The Gods of the Copybook Headings

—— by Rudyard Kipling

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things. Read More »