ALAN writes:

Several months ago I had occasion to visit the planetarium in St. Louis. The James S. McDonnell Planetarium is in the same building I visited numerous times from 1963 through 1974. It stands within a cultural and metaphysical setting radically different from where it stood then: Trendy, cutesy, cutting-edge, and drenched in hip-and-cool. It is now part planetarium, part fun house, and part platform for political sloganeering.

The Planetarium in 1963:

The setting is one of traditional form and restraint. Well-attired, well-mannered grown-ups. Men wearing suits and serious hats, not blue jeans and ball caps. Women wearing dresses, not pants and t-shirts. No tattooed women. Parents in control of children. Grown-ups did not use profanity in public settings.  No screens.  Hour-long presentations.  Classical music. Nothing overly loud. Classrooms and library of astronomical books and periodicals.  No “play areas” for children.  No ideological sloganeering.  No mention of feminism, “diversity” or “inclusion”.  People did not carry amusements with them.

The Planetarium in 2025:

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THIS site has been offline for a couple of days while it was moved to a new server. Several recent posts were unintentionally deleted in the process and do not appear. I am restoring them.

The site in the future should function much better than it has in many months.

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Laura writes:

“Archbishop” of Glasgow William Nolan is seen here in a recent Facebook post making the inverted pyramid hand sign, which is associated with Freemasonry. That he would do it openly in Masonic Scotland is not so surprising. Could it have been accidental? Perhaps, but it just doesn’t appear that way.

Peggy Hall, by the way, recently did a post on the various Masonic hand signs used by celebrities and politicians. She includes many images.

Unfortunately, this gesture is not as bold as the writings and speeches of the Vatican II Church’s “popes,” from John XXIII to Leo XIV, which are filled with Masonic ideas — always mixed in with Catholic doctrine. They have openly pushed, for instance, the doctrine of universal salvation, which is part of the Masonic creed. They have warped the faith in the minds of millions, changing dogma, worship, discipline and morals — in short everything. But, and this is so crucial, they have mixed it with true Catholicism. Ambiguity and contradiction are their masterstrokes. (more…)

TRUMP is a fantastic liar. Always has been. Doubling down on big lies is the way to make people accept them. Just confidently assert a falsehood.

In an interview with Laura Ingraham yesterday, he insisted the economy was the best ever. “Eggs are now what they were .. we got it all down.”

Eggs are the only things that are less (less than they were under the fake bird flu). Also, he said, we will need to bring in lots more foreign workers. There just isn’t enough talent in America to fill the jobs he will supposedly be creating. Trump has closed the southern border to bring in more Asians, but then he never was against open borders.

Don’t trust Ingraham, by the way, she’s just a shill for the GOP, which like the Democratic Party, represents the will of the banksters. Democracy is another name for Communism with a veneer of capitalism and feel-good socialism. Both parties will continue to do the will of their masters and flood this country with foreigners, inflicting onerous inflation while increasing governmental control over every aspect of our lives.

Trump says things will be better with 50-year mortgages. Who do you think will benefit most?

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MY BOY JACK
by Rudyard Kipling

“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

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Prayer for Deceased Soldiers

Thou art all-powerful, O God, and livest forever in light and joy. Look with pity and love, we beseech Thee, upon those who have bravely fought and gallantly died for our country. (more…)

“IT is an odd weakness of mankind, that while death surrounds us in its myriad forms, it is never present to our minds. At funerals one only hears words of astonishment that a mortal man has died. Each brings to mind the last time he spoke with the deceased and what they had spoken about. Then, all of sudden, he was dead. And we say: How fleeting are a man’s days! (more…)

MICHAEL S. writes:

I will be skipping the 2026 New Year’s Concert from Vienna.

You can probably guess why … (WARNING: Obnoxious photograph.)

I’m not even sure this “guy” conducts the Vienna Philharmonic much at all. (more…)

NICK Fuentes is a repulsive blabbermouth in the highly compromised “alt-right” who could only rise to popularity in today’s media snake pit if he was being financially supported and protected by powerful people.

He praises Stalin and Communism. He says the most outrageous things about feminism, race, anti-semitism, etc., always favoring the extreme and tarnishing the image of genuine opposition. He calls himself a Catholic, they say, which even in this day of nominal Catholicism is impossible to believe.

I believe Nick Fuentes doesn’t believe in anything — he’s an agent provocateur enjoying an artificial and profitable rise to fame. (more…)

EYESOFTHEREPUBLIC.com presents evidence against various figures and outlets in American media, including Alex Jones, Mike Adams, Zerohedge and Ron McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute.

James Fulk provides a “Russian Information Warfare Ecosystem” chart here. He wrote in 2024: (more…)

“THE thought of death and what follows death can be not only salutary, but even sweet and attractive, by linking it with the thought of our deceased ones — parents, relations, neighbours, friends. When a person is advanced in years, he can count more friends beyond the grave than this side of it. It is sweet to live in memory with them, to pray for and to them. When our conversation is with them, as St. Paul might put it, we learn to see the things of this life in their proper perspective. The soul turns from things of earth, and unites itself with God, and longs for the day when they shall receive it into everlasting dwellings, where it will be united to its friends. The invisible and beneficient presence of our departed friends is about it. Whether they are in Heaven or in Purgatory, they pray for us. When the soul has tasted the sweetness of this company, it cannot be separated from it, because the world holds no charm for it and a heavenly nostalgia fills it to the overflow.

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FROM “The Heresy of Democracy: A Study in the History of Government,” by Lord Percy of Newcastle (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1954):

Religion always asserts the Equality of all men. In a sense, that is what religion is for. But obviously, no two human beings can be equated in their totality. To assert their equality is to make a judgment of value, to believe that certain characteristics common to both have a special importance to each. To make such a judgement is an essential function of religion. Primitive or debased religion asserts the equal liability of all men to the arbitrary action of the gods, or their equal dependence upon the processes of nature. From that, at ascending levels, religions have asserted the equal subjection of all men to a divine moral law, or their equal son-ship to the fatherhood of a single or a supreme God. At the Christian level, the assertion has been expressed in a more compelling language, which has been the origin of all that seems to most of us most lovely in the social life of the Western Continents, and most enduring in their law…. (more…)

“THE revolutionary intelligentsia in every nation on the continent had been vitally interested in the American experiment from the beginning. How else can we explain so many foreigners who suddenly appeared out of nowhere to occupy posts of command in the American revolutionary militia? The Germans, General Von Steuben and ‘Baron’ de Kalb, the Poles Kosciuszko and Count Pulaski, the French Count de Rochambeau, Count de Grasse and the Marquis de Lafayette, not to mention the English and Irish and others? Is it coincidence that these were nearly all, if not all, Masons? (more…)

“THE existence of fire in Purgatory is vouched for also by numerous apparitions and private revelations. They demonstrate to our very eyes this fire as a material one, thus indicating that the words ‘fire’ and ‘fiery torments’ used by Scripture are to be taken in a literal sense. St. Bridget, of whom the Church, in her official prayer, says, ‘O God, who through Thy Divine Son didst reveal to blessed Bridget heavenly mysteries,’ was permitted in one of her ecstacies to witness how a soul was sentenced to a three-fold punishment: to an external and internal fire, an intense cold, and to furious assaults of the devil. Mechtildis of Magdeburg saw a lake of fire mixed with brimstone, in which the Suffering Souls had to bathe in order to be cleansed. According to St. Frances of Rome Purgatory consists of three apartments, one above the other, all alive with a clear, sparkling fire, unlike that of hell, which is dark and sombre. Bautz … relates of the Venerable Mary Anna Lindmayer: ‘Her friend Mary Becher and her mother appeared to her, and left marks of fire on one of her feet, which she saw and felt for weeks. At one time she beheld Purgatory in the shape of a torrent of fiery water, at another, as a prison of fire. The souls themselves appeared to her as sparks of fire falling about her. The appearance of some souls caused her to shiver with frost caused by the cold proceeding from them.’

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THIS two-part exposé of alternative media figures looks at their slanted pro-Russian propaganda.

Still relevant and worth watching.

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Softly and gently, dearly-ransom’d soul,
In my most loving arms I now enfold thee,

And, o’er the penal waters, as they roll,
I poise thee, and I lower thee, and hold thee.

And carefully I dip thee in the lake,
And thou, without a sob or a resistance,

Dost through the flood thy rapid passage take,
Sinking deep, deeper, into the dim distance.

Angels, to whom the willing task is given,
Shall tend, and nurse, and lull thee, as thou liest;

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TODAY is All Souls’ Day, the start of this beautiful month of praying for the faithful departed.

From “Three Glances at the Cemetery” by Rev. John Evangelist Zollner, 1884:

If we cast a glance into the grave what do we see? We see:

1. What the dead man has in the grave. Alas! he has nothing but his winding-sheet and the coffin which contains his mouldering body. Though he may have been rich during life, though he may have had money by the millions, superb houses, immense possessions, and a lucrative business, he now possesses nothing of all these things; he must say with Job: “Only the grave remaineth for me.” The Caliph Hesham, who died at Baspha, in the year 742, possessed seven hundred boxes of gold pieces, and so large a quantity of clothes and silk garments, that to remove these goods from one place to another six hundred camels were required. He had scarcely closed his eyes in death, when his palace was plundered, and there was not left even a basin in which to wash his inanimate body, not a piece of linen in which to wrap it for the grave. How poor death made this rich ruler!

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