ALAN writes:

“Where were the teen-agers?,” Mr. John T. Stewart asked after he attended a performance of Shakespeare by the Old Vic Company at the American Theater in downtown St. Louis in the 1950s. He was writing about his 52 years of memories of theatergoing in St. Louis from 1906 to 1958.  [John T. Stewart, “Golden Days of the Theater in St. Louis”, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Nov. 12, 1958, p. 3H]

He continued: “Do they have no feeling or regard for the living stage? Do they really believe that what they see and hear on television is worthy drama? The student whose only impression of the art is taken from the movie screen or television set could not even imagine what was offered in the ‘good old days’…..”

Of course the answer to his questions was that concerted efforts were being made in the 1950s to separate the younger generation from the older, a project made easier by three cultural factors:  The “youth revolution”, firmly in place by the 1950s;  the increasing presence of television in Americans’ daily lives;  and the promotion of a peculiar form of noise aimed at the young and called “rock and roll music”.

Those things were more than enough to eclipse any likelihood that teenagers would be able to understand the magical appeal of live theater.

“Television was hard on the little theater groups,” a woman said as she recalled her days in the 1940s-‘50s with the Trinity Dramatic Club, a church group in south St. Louis.  It had the same effect on professional theater life. From our vantage point 75 years later, it is easy to see that canned entertainment readily available by turning dials and pushing buttons had the effect of softening up an entire generation. (more…)

"ILLEGAL Mexican migrant tells reporter ‘F**k the American people’ and laugher breaks out among other migrants. "The migrant, thought to be #cartels, told reporter they are in America to enjoy the good life American taxpayers provide. "He then says Americans are “racists” and “envious”, and he doesn’t respect them. "These are the people pouring into White countries, completely unopposed: they are filled with hatred, disrespect for the Natives while having entitlement." (Arminius News)  

"WITHOUT patience nothing can be conceived by the mind, nothing can be understood, nothing can be taught. For all things look to patience. Neither faith nor hope; neither justice nor humility; neither chastity nor honesty; nor concord; nor charity; nor any act of virtue; nor even the elements of nature; are able to hold together, or keep their consistency, without the nerve, restraint, and discipline of patience. Patience is always mature: it is humble, prudent, cautious, provident, and contented under every necessity that arises. Tranquil in the day of clouds and amidst the tempests of provocation, it allows nothing to disturb the serenity of the soul. The patient man knows of neither alteration nor regret. Who can say that he ever suffers loss? Whatever he has to endure, you will find him as complete at the end of his sufferings as though he had suffered nothing. How can we calculate the results of his patience? When he seems to have undergone defeat, we find he has got the victory." --- St. Zeno, De Patientia, c. I.  

NGOs are smuggling immigrants into Europe on an industrial scale: 1. Migrant smugglers load up boats from Tripoli, Libya, deliberately using faulty boats with limited fuel 2. Faulty boats breaks down in Libyan water or nearby 3. NGOs stationed nearby pick them up and bring them to Italy NGOs serve as a pull factor of illegal immigration and often even operate in collusion with human smugglers. These organizations should be banned and criminalized. (Source: Arminius News)    

NOT meaning to promote Mark Dice, but this is well done.  

HAVE you wondered why major retailers have taken a hands-off approach to shoplifting in recent years and why some municipalities have done the same? This is strange and it doesn’t seem to make sense. California even has a proposed bill to prohibit store employees from confronting shoplifters.

And,

In the past 10 years, nearly half of all states have boosted their thresholds for retail felony theft. Thirty-eight states now don’t consider shoplifting a felony unless $1,000 or more of merchandise gets stolen. A 2020 National Retail Federation report on organized retail crime found that two-thirds of retailers in states that had raised their felony shoplifting minimums reported growing retail theft. (Source/2019) (more…)

 OBESITY is part of the dramatic cultural decline that has overtaken Ireland with the loss of its Catholic heritage. The country is on its way to becoming the fattest in Europe.  

 I HOPE this recording of the ever-popular second movement of Antonin Dvořák's Symphony No. 9, also known as the New World Symphony, fills you with affection for your country today. The symphony was composed in 1893 while Dvořák was the director of the National Conservatory of Music of America and was first performed in New York City. The Czech composer "wrote that he would not have composed his American pieces as he had if he had not seen America. It has been said that Dvořák was inspired by the 'wide open spaces' of America, such as prairies he may have seen on his trip to Iowa in the summer of 1893. Notices about several performances of the symphony include the phrase 'wide open spaces' about what inspired the symphony and/or about the feelings it conveys to listeners." (Source) The piece evokes so much that is beautiful about America -- things best said in sound.  

THE organized riots in France are justified by the history of French colonization of Algeria. Rarely mentioned is the motivation for French involvement. The 19th-century military raid on Algiers was intended, in part, to stop the Barbary slave trade, which had enslaved so many Europeans from the 1500's to mid-1800s that population density along some parts of the coasts of Europe declined dramatically. The Regency of Algiers was one of the main bases of the Barbary pirates and Barbary Slave Traders who attacked Christian ships and coastal settlements in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic. Like the rest of the Barbary Coast, the Regency of Algiers lived from the trade of slaves or goods captured from Europe, America and sub-Saharan Africa. The European powers bombarded Algiers on different occasions in retaliation and the United States provoked the Barbary Wars in order to put an end to Algerian privateering against Christian shipping.[18] The conquest of Algeria began in the last days of the Bourbon Restoration by Charles X of France. It aimed to put a definite end to Barbary privateering and increase the king's popularity among the French people, particularly in Paris, where many veterans of the Napoleonic Wars lived. Algerian slave trade and piracy immediately ceased after the French conquered Algiers. (Source) Slavery in the American colonies was a piece of cake compared to slavery under the Ottomans. Boys and women were used as sex slaves and many slaves were worked to death. Robert Davis estimates that slave traders from Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli enslaved 1 million to 1.25 million Europeans in North Africa, from…

JEAN-FRANCOIS Gariépy reviews the situation in France. You can also view the video clip here, starting at minute 43:00.  

MALE PAINTERS have given us countless paintings of women in summer.

They have depicted women in gardens, women on the beach, women on cliffs, women sitting under trees in silent forests. They have painted women reading books on garden benches, women lying in hammocks, women sunbathing, women with parasols, women in canoes and women swimming in the sea. They have painted moody women and entrancing women and innocent women and indolent women.

The subject of women in summer is a natural one. For the tranquility and beauty of summer moments correspond to the feminine at its best.

Men (and female artists too) have lavishly portrayed the contemplative side of women in summer paintings. Pagan artists of Greece and Rome produced female nudes, often exquisite. But they could not capture what later artists did with the fully clothed woman in a summer landscape. The soul took precedence over the sensual, without eclipsing it. (All of these paintings, by the way, would be absurd with women in pants. The dress is the ceremonial expression of the contemplative side of women. Pants are for doing, and also obliterate the inspiring, mysterious differentiation of the sexes.)

Contemplative men may become great philosophers, contemplative women rarely achieve fame in the world or the heights of intellect. Their mental activity is not any less important or essential. That’s what these paintings suggest. The world needs this stillness. There would be no philosophers without it.

Life demands activity, constant work and accomplishment from men, often cruelly. What is it worth, how can it go on, how can civilization go on, without the calm created by pools of feminine reverie? Its nothingness is indeed something.

But these are indeed aristocratic thoughts in a proletarian, Soviet-style age.

Feminists like to say men historically excluded women from the world of art. Nonsense. Women are art. In their being, not their accomplishments, these ideal women complement the glories of summer. The great sacrifices involved in producing these works (feminists speak of art as if it is power when in fact it is usually lonely abnegation and grueling work) attest to how much men are driven not just by outward beauty, although definitely that, but by this mysterious inner dimension.

[Thanks to It’s About Time for these images, which are a tiny sample of the paintings of women in summer landscapes.]

(more…)

"JUST as it is with those who break the laws, when punishment overtakes them: they throw the blame upon those who frame the laws , but not upon themselves. In like manner do those men, filled with a satanic spirit, bring innumerable accusations against our Creator, who has both given to us the spirit of life, and established a law adapted for all; and they will not admit that the judgment of God is just." --- St. Irenaeus, d. 202  

THERE is no changing the realities of race. Anyone who says it is un-Christian to consider these realities suffers from excessive idealism and possible hubris. God made us body and soul. We cannot spiritualize our physical nature, including traits inherited from our ancestors, away. A race is an extended family. Race is more than just skin color. It involves psychology, temperament, and deeply ingrained spiritual instincts. To recognize racial realities is not to “hate” those of other races anymore than to prefer one’s family is to hate other families nor is it necessarily to embark on some equally unrealistic campaign for racial purity or total racial determinism.

Along those lines, here is a good summary from Thuletide of race in American politics, as gleaned from the 2022 presidential election:

People of First World origin (Whites and Asians) hold, per capita, more resources than people of Third World origin (Hispanics and Africans).

People of Third World origin stand to gain resources (territory, jobs, welfare, etc.) from Leftist social and economic policies (pro-mass migration, affirmative action, etc.). Therefore, ethnocentric Third Worlders are more likely to support Left-Wing politics, even if they are often socially conservative.

[As Thuletide shows elsewhere, Asians are also much more likely to support left-wing policies.]

People of First World origin stand to lose resources from Leftist policies. Therefore, ethnocentric First Worlders are more likely to support Right-Wing politics.

This is simply a case of offensive and defensive politics: The Left-Wing represents migrants and people who aim to take resources from the native population. The Right-Wing represents the native population aiming to defend their resources (and the intelligent migrants who also stand to lose resources from Leftism). (more…)

"[BIOLOGIST LOUIS] Agassiz wrote: ‘Let any one who doubts the evil of this mixture of races, and is inclined from mistaken philanthropy to break down all barriers between them, come to Brazil. He cannot deny the deterioration consequent upon the amalgamation of races, more widespread here than in any country in the world, and which is rapidly effacing the best qualities of the white man, the negro, and the Indian, leaving a mongrel, nondescript type, deficient in physical and mental energy.’ "The mongrel’s political ascendancy produces precisely the results which might have been expected. These unhappy beings, every cell of whose bodies is a battle-ground of jarring heredities, express their souls in acts of hectic violence and aimless instability. The normal state of tropical America is anarchy, restrained only by domestic tyrants or foreign masters. Garcia-Calderon exactly describes its psychology when he writes: 'Precocious, sensual, impressionable, the Americans of these vast territories devote their energies to local politics. Industry, commerce, and agriculture are in a state of decay, and the unruly imagination of the Creole expends itself in constitutions, programmes, and lyrical discourses; in these regions anarchy is sovereign mistress.' The tropical republics display, indeed, a tendency toward “‘atomic disintegration. ... Given to dreaming, they are led by presidents suffering from neurosis. "The stock feature of the mongrel tropics is, of course, the 'revolution.' These senseless and perennial outbursts are often ridiculed in the United States as comic opera, but…

ATTENDEES at a "Pride" fest surround a street preacher and bark like dogs. It's all about love.