He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two. For whom, it suddenly occurred to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His mind hovered for a moment round the doubtful date on the page, and then fetched up with a bump against the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him. How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless. ---  George Orwell, 1984. GEORGE ORWELL'S world-famous book 1984 has probably been quoted more often in the last two years than ever before -- and this bleak examination of life in a Communist-style, global dictatorship as experienced by one man is justifiably considered prophetic. Are we living in the incipient stages of a real life version of Orwell's 1984? Terms such as "alone together, "asymptomatic transmission," "anti-vaxxer," …

JULIE B. writes:

In response to your post of October 11, 2021, “The Purpose of Staged Shootings,” it occurred to me that the possibility exists that the incident involving Alec Baldwin could have been staged. As most of us realize, what is the chance that a loaded gun would “appear” on a movie set without a purpose? Shifting concern toward gun control rather than focusing on the criminals that are responsible for this tragedy is deplorable. (more…)

THINK Communism ended in Lithuania? It hasn't. Read about one refusenik's experience today: I want to share the situation which my family and I are now facing because of Covid Pass restrictions. We live in the small European country of Lithuania. In the last few months, strict Covid Pass restrictions have been introduced which represent a fundamental transformation in society. In this article, I'll describe the details of how the Covid Pass works in my country and how it affects my family. As a start, we're banned from shopping centers, non-essential stores, and restaurants. And my wife and I were both were suspended from our jobs without pay. The principled people in Lithuania were killed by the Communists years ago and their descendants do not exist. Only obedient followers are left.  

FROM a reader out West.

"MY WIFE got me an acrylic paint set some time ago, and I have dabbled with it enough to reach a few conclusions. One, painting really is enjoyable and therapeutic…I can lose myself in it in the same way I can lose myself in puttering in the garden or ironing (and yes, I do enjoy ironing, as most old Marines do). Two, I have absolutely no talent for painting. And three, I have a fresh respect for artists who can actually produce objects that actually look like what the artist envisioned. There is a certain arrogance among many today, helped along by the repulsive garbage known as postmodern art, that anyone can just grab up a brush, swish it around in some Van Dyke brown, and create art. Likewise, the same breezy assumptions crouch behind the oft-heard statement, 'I may write a book someday.' Two sides of the same tin coin. 'If I can draw a stick figure, I can produce art, and If I can write a sentence, I can write.' -- S.K. Orr, Steeple Tea

WHAT IS masculinity? What is femininity?

Here is a description with perfect clarity from the Catholic Encyclopedia in its entry for “Woman”:

The same essentially identical human nature appears in the male and female sex in two-fold personal form; there are, consequently, male and female persons. On the other hand, there is no neutral human person without distinction of sex. Hence follows in the first place, woman’s claim to the possession of full and complete human nature, and thus, to complete equality in moral value and position as compared with man before the Creator. It is, therefore, not permissible to take one sex as the one absolutely perfect and as the standard of value for the other. Aristotle’s designation of woman as an incomplete or mutilated man (“De animal. gennerat.”, II, 3d ed. Berol., 773a) must, therefore, be rejected. The untenable medieval definition, “Femina est mas occasionatus”, also arose under Aristotelian influence. The same view is to be found in the “last Scholastic”, Dionysius Ryckel (“Opera minora”, ed. Tournay, 1907, II, 161a).

Notice how feminism, like ancient paganism and this medieval error, does take masculinity as the standard of value, i.e., a woman is not complete unless she can compete equally with man in all spheres of life.

The entry continues:

The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul. On the other hand, woman has qualities which man lacks. With truth does the writer on education, Lorenz Kellner, say: “I call the female sex neither the beautiful nor the weak sex (in the absolute sense). The one designation is the invention equally of sensuality and of flattery; the other owes its currency to masculine arrogance. In its way the female sex is as strong as the male, namely in endurance and patience, in quiet long-suffering, in short, in all that concerns its real sphere, viz., the inner life” (Lose Blätter”, Collected by von Görgen; Freiburg, 1895, 50). (more…)

MORE beautiful photographs by Kidist Paulos Asrat here.  

IN 1927, G.K. Chesterton wrote:

There is of course a great deal more to be said. I have dealt with only one feature of Birth Control – its exceedingly unpleasant origin. I said it was purely capitalist and reactionary; I venture to say I have proved it was entirely capitalist and reactionary. But there are many other aspects of this evil thing. It is unclean in the light of the instincts; it is unnatural in relation to the affections; it is part of a general attempt to run the populace on a routine of quack medicine and smelly science; it is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands; it is ignorant of the very existence of real households where prudence comes by free-will and agreement. It has all those aspects, and many of them would be extraordinarily interesting to discuss. But in order not to occupy too much space, I will take as a text nothing more than the title.

A Piece of Humbug

The very name of ‘Birth Control’ is a piece of pure humbug. It is one of those blatant euphemisms used in the headlines of the Trust Press. It is like ‘Tariff Reform.’ It is like ‘Free Labour.’ It is meant to mean nothing, that it may mean anything, and especially some thing totally different from what it says.

Everybody believes in birth control, and nearly everybody has exercised some control over the conditions of birth. People do not get married as somnambulists or have children in their sleep. But throughout numberless ages and nations, the normal and real birth control is called self control. (more…)

NBA star Kyrie Irving has refused to take the Covid "vaccine," causing his suspension and supposedly threatening his lucrative career. Interestingly, Irving has not stated publicly any real reasons for declining the shot, making it seem like nothing more than an irrational personal decision. He doesn't ever mention the many thousands of people who have died from the shots. He has also stated that he will not give up basketball because of a "vaccine" mandate. Is he a controlled opposition figure? Is this all political theater? The fact that Irving is so prominent in the news suggests it is. Will he actually push the narrative by later changing his mind or coming down with a serious "illness?" Time will tell. Mag Truth on the Run has some skeptical analysis. (Language warning.) Irving's "just playing with the dumb people, " says Mag. From the video comments: [T]hey'll have him claim to have it and give a speech about how he should have gotten the vacc when he had the chance, then he'll die shortly after or else he'll get it and claim he took that same [Remsdivir] garbage that Trump claimed to take and he's feeling so much better now. [Thanks to September Clues.]  

A STUDY by a Harvard researcher demolishes the contention that the "unvaccinated" are causing respiratory illnesses. To the contrary, the more people "vaccinated" for Covid in any country or U.S. county, the more people who reportedly are sick with Covid. [This post is not an endorsement of all of the content at Vaccine Impact.]  

A BLACK man in Philadelphia is accused of raping a black woman on a public transit train one evening last week. Even worse, bystanders reportedly saw the incident and did nothing as her clothes were violently ripped off and she was openly attacked.

Most or all of the people on the train — and reportedly there were “a lot” of passengers — were probably black and most or all of the passengers apparently had cell phones that would have enabled them to call 911. None of them made that call. In fact, it has been reported that some of the passengers filmed the attack on their phones.

Where are racial agitators when you need them? Where’s the looting? The kicking in of store windows? The stealing of sneakers? Where was this kind of thing after three black women were recently shot as they sat in a car?

Violence is worse than ever in Philadelphia, as it is in other American cities — and that’s no surprise given the total disruption of ordinary life in 2020 and the calculated moral valorization of the violent criminal George Floyd. Last year had the highest homicide rate in Philadelphia since 1960, a 54 percent increase over 2019, and this year is even worse. While billionaires have consolidated their wealth with pandemic fraud and other forms of white-collar criminality that ultimately lead to more untimely deaths than those on the crime-ridden streets of Philadelphia, life is cheaper than ever in black neighborhoods, where armed thugs have such notoriously poor aim that they often hit people — including young children — who are not even their intended targets. The vast majority of the hundreds of people killed in Philadelphia this year and last have been black and the vast majority of the suspected perpetrators are black.

Given the ongoing, extreme glorification by corporations, educational institutions, government and white, virtue-signaling soccer moms of the well-funded, Communist-agitprop organization Black Lives Matter, we can come up with an inescapable rule:

The more Black Lives Matter, the less black lives matter.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say, this rape in Philadelphia might not have even occurred, and hundreds of black people might still be alive, if George Floyd had never become a villainous hero and Confederate statues had never been toppled on the streets of Richmond. (more…)

HURRICANE BETSY writes:

The BBC recently reported:

Anti-vaccine residents in a village in rural Guatemala have attacked nurses who were trying to administer Covid-19 jabs, holding them for seven hours, officials say.

About 500 people blocked a road and vandalised the team’s cars in Maguilá, in the northern Alta Verapaz province.

Ha, ha, ha. Love these folks to bits! What is wrong with us?

I recall reading, years ago, when the vaccine truck arrived in a certain area of Africa for the second time, the mothers grabbed their babies and ran into the bushes to hide. Their children had been showing ominous symptoms after their initial shots. What is with all this anti-Negro stuff I hear, that they are not as smart as we purportedly are? (more…)

ALAN writes:

In later years, after my father died, I met a woman who grew up on the same street two blocks down from my father’s boyhood home in St. Louis. Pauline told me how she remembered the small shops, dime stores, movie houses, a saddle shop, and a tobacco store that had been there in the 1940s-‘50s.

Photographs taken there as late as the 1950s show perfectly ordinary street scenes of people walking past stores and men putting up Christmas decorations on lampposts.  One little store after another stood side by side, block after block.  Some sold groceries, some were dinettes, some sold Red Goose Shoes, some offered Eagle Stamps or Top Value stamps with purchases.  The scenes do not suggest a “blighted” neighborhood—which was the official excuse for tearing down the whole neighborhood just a few years later.

In 2012, I wrote about the people who lived there.  [“Vanishing Americans (St. Louis Chapter)“, The Thinking Housewife, May 25, 2012]

Shortly afterward, Pauline sent me a card and wrote:

     “Just finished reading your essay again.  It is wonderful.  It brought back so many memories for me.  How I wish things were like they were back then.”

I am confident she meant the moral fabric of that neighborhood, upheld in those years both by the neighborhood churches and by the city government.  Her family lived in that area for a hundred years.

I miss my father terribly and I miss Pauline and others of her generation whose memories were the gossamer threads of connection to that time and place. People who lived there were incubated in down-to-earth common sense. There is no evidence that women wore tattoos or green or purple hair, or that men wore ponytails or earrings. I often think that theirs was the last generation who had grit.  They never whined, complained, or expected handouts. Making excuses was alien to their character. A nationwide welfare-feeding trough would have been unthinkable to them. They could not have imagined a frame of mind that would create such a monstrosity or try to justify it. They accommodated themselves to hardness; they absorbed it into their character and frame of mind, and they became better by doing so.  Because life was hard, they appreciated its occasional joys and pleasures more deeply. (more…)

JOHANNA writes:

Lately, all I want to hear or read is good news and despite all the seeming evidence to the contrary there is plenty around as your essay demonstrates so well. I love birds (and butterflies) as well and have written many poems about them. I thought you might appreciate one of them.

And I don’t even like Grackles

I’ve turned over every leaf — two days
gone without a sighting. My first

glimpse was of a single puddle
on the leaf-littered lawn, a black

puff spread on a dew-jeweled
table. Each cock of its head drew

a new shade of satin. Half buried
beside one of the boulders that circle (more…)