[Reposted from 2018]

CLIFFORD HUGH DOUGLAS (1879-1952) was one of the most important economic thinkers of modern times, and yet his plan for reform known as Social Credit (not to be confused with the Chinese system of the same name) is little known. The British engineer discovered a fundamental problem in industrialized, capitalist economies and he believed modern wars were caused by this “irritant,” which was the inability to provide enough paying jobs and income to citizens, who could thus not afford to buy the products produced. His discovery is as timely today as it was when he was alive — in fact, it is more relevant than while he was alive.

The monopoly of private bankers over the control and distribution of money ultimately strangles economies. Michael Watson explains in a review of a new book on Social Credit by Dr. M. Oliver Heydorn:

This monopoly gradually transfers more and more wealth, privilege and power into fewer and fewer hands by taking advantage of a chronic gap between consumer prices and consumer incomes. The only means for consumers to acquire additional and much needed purchasing power is to borrow money from the private banks, which these same banks also create out of nothing. The aforementioned price and income gap is a recent phenomenon and is the result of the increasing displacement of human labour by technological developments resulting in fewer jobs and thus less money in wages, salaries, and dividends being distributed to consumers. There is therefore a constant need for economic “growth” for the sake of growth to fill this gap and by any means possible. … [T]his is most often being achieved by maintaining imprudently high net immigration flows into the country to provide more consumers and also the selling off resources, production, farmland and property to foreign companies and investors to pay down bank loans and fill the credit gap.

Watson writes:

Families are torn apart by financial woes. Automation is replacing more and more jobs. Average people’s buying power just shrinks by the year and yet few people, if any, seem to know why or how all this is really happening. To further exacerbate this crisis, both parents are being forced to take on work outside the home at the expense of the children who must be placed in the care of commercial day care providers. And this pressure is further intensified by the decreasing availability of stable jobs, thus leading to the spoliation of family life and leisure and the economic and social destitution of men and women. Once upon a time about fifty years ago, a father could provide for the whole of his family with just one income, i.e., without the mother having to work outside the home.

Douglas came to his theory during World War I:

It was while he was reorganising the work of the Royal Aircraft Establishment during World War I that Douglas noticed that the weekly total costs of goods produced was greater than the sums paid to workers for wages, salaries and dividends. This seemed to contradict the theory of classic Ricardian economics, that all costs are distributed simultaneously as purchasing power. (more…)

TRUMP boasts of bringing more than half a million more Chinese students into America. Supposedly it's part of a strategic deal to help American business. Once again: Sold to the highest bidder.  

IT IS essential when resisting the Kalergi Plan and the deliberate submerging of the American soul and nation through multicultural immigration to refuse all resentment toward the people from around the world who are taking advantage of this plan and have come to this country for personal gain.

To take just one example, when one sees Asians from India buying up American motels and gas stations with the help of loans from the “American” government — loans that are denied white Americans, it is essential to direct one’s anger and energy toward the right place and not toward those who are merely following the imperatives of self-preservation and the temptations toward greed that are placed in their path. (more…)

THE Contemplative Observer has must-read commentary on the highly-significant meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska on August 15th: (more…)

KATHY G. writes:

One of my favorite books when I homeschooled my children, was a large, charming one-hundred-year-old book, titled The Handbook of Nature Study, by Anna Botsford Comstock. In fact, I enjoyed it far more than my children did! (more…)

“THE MESSAGE of Hollywood is the total significance of sexual love as an end in itself—the erotic without consequences. The sexual love of two grains of sand, two rootless individuals, not the primeval sexual love looking to the continuity of Life, the family of many children. One child is permitted, as being a more complicated toy than a dog, perhaps even two, one boy and one girl—but the family of many children is a subject for humor to this decadent outlook. (more…)

PENNY writes:

I wanted to thank you for publishing Alan’s “The Night Sky in a World of Hype” and Alan for sharing it. His mentioning of Leslie Peltier piqued my interest so much that I ordered his autobiography Starlight Nights through my library’s borrowing system. I have been enjoying it immensely. He’s truly writing about a different time and way of living. There are bits of it that remind me of when I was little (almost 50 years ago): how people sat outdoors after dinner and enjoyed the breeze and the scent of the lilac bushes or talked about how the garden was growing. That doesn’t seem to happen so much any more. When my neighbors are outside, they’re in the pool on their smartphones, not just sitting and looking. I suppose that goes with the modern ethos – you can’t just sit; you have to be doing something to justify it.

Though I’m not an outdoor person much anymore, I’ve spent the summer immersed in nature essays and books. I’ve gone camping and trout fishing with John S. Burroughs and read about strawberries he remembered. (more…)

“SUCH as I love, I rebuke and chastise.”

— St. John, Rev. 3-19 (more…)

"TODAY ... we see the true emblem of purity, better than snow or ice, however spotless; for we see a human heart, warm with the warmest human love, throbbing and yearning as with the love of all hearts in one, and yet, nay by very reason of its vehement love, the home and emblem of purity--the most loving of the loving, and the purest of the pure." --- Rev. Arthur Ryan, 1877  

ONE often finds when Jewish people react to public criticism that they instantly claim they are being exposed to “Jew hatred” or “hateful” statements. This reaction — this use of the word ‘hate’ — is used by the powerful Anti-Defamation League all the time and thus is taught and reinforced by Jewish leaders.

This word “hate,” I maintain, is a rhetorical weapon. You might even say it is a case of projection and at times represents not hatred of Jews, but hatred by Jews.

Let’s unpack it for a moment.

To criticize someone is not necessarily to hate him. If my neighbor were to pull up with a dump truck and deposit a load of gravel at the end of my driveway, I would be very angry and would definitely criticize his conduct. But would that mean that I hated my neighbor? (more…)

WE heard a sudden, ear-splitting yell. I couldn’t make out the exact words, but it sounded like, “No, I won’t!”

Then the source of the noise, a little, tousle-haired boy, about five years old, a look of complete and unashamed defiance on his face, threw himself to the ground. He began twisting and writhing on his back, clutching what looked like a small toy in one of his hands.

Two men, both tall and thin, dressed in fashionable, tight shorts, stood over him. They were, it seems, pretending to be his parents. (more…)

  Credit

WHAT other people would create an organization (the ADL) solely to defend a man unanimously convicted by a jury of murdering and raping a young girl — and then turn this organization into a multi-million dollar instrument of domestic terror?

Even today, 110 years after Leo Frank’s death by hanging, the Anti-Defamation League with all its big bucks and arsenal of stomach-turning sophistries cannot deny that Frank, who was lynched by a mob infuriated by the failure to carry out his sentence, was unanimously convicted by a trial jury, by a grand jury and by a coroner’s jury and that the Southern “racists” on those juries all refused to convict the black man Frank’s attorneys framed without evidence for the murder of  the Irish factory worker, Mary Phagan. (more…)

YUVAL Noah Harari warns the people they may become useless.

The typical Jewish leader is without empathy, at least for non-Jews. (more…)

"A SAINT is not someone who never sins, but one who sins less and less frequently and gets up more and more quickly."                      --- St. Bernard  

JANICE writes: Great writing on a very good topic, Alan! The hypesters are always selling us some thrill of one kind or another, aren’t they? If they’re not using scary and horrifying fiction to hyper-stimulate, they (mis)use the beauty and mystery of the natural world to do it. Don’t forget as we are taking in their narrative that they always remind us what unimportant, dangerous carbon-producers we human beings are!  

Bombast is the hip, cool “marketing” crowd’s reason for being… The sky and the stars are never enough. Hipsters and Hypesters must liven them up with excitement, spectacle, surround-sound, fast-edit cuts, and garish color illustrations. They cannot stand anything that is quiet and restrained and might therefore encourage thought, wonder, contemplation. They cannot package and market those things. They are in business to reduce the sky, the stars, the whole universe to on-screen entertainment.   

ALAN writes:

A few months ago, a conjunction of planets was visible in the night sky.  A woman I know learned about it from an Internet blurb and then looked for it after dark.  But she said afterward that she could not see it.  Of course she could not see it.  I knew she wouldn’t. That is partly because of bright city lights that make even the brighter stars hard to see. But it is also partly because “it” was not the same thing as the garish color depictions that are now common on the Internet. It was not her fault that blurbs like those are gross misrepresentations of what can be seen in the night sky.

Overblown color illustrations, photographs, and “artists’ conceptions” in books, magazines, and Internet sites have taught three generations of Americans to expect to see such things in the night sky. They are victims of a hoax and a fraud perpetrated by the entertainment and marketing rackets.

In ancient times, 1963-’67, I read magazines like The Review of Popular Astronomy and Sky and Telescope.  They were serious magazines written by and for a specialized audience: People with an interest in the night sky. That excluded most people. It still excludes most people, partly because of the dumbing down of American culture, but largely because most people at night now pursue higher interests on their big-screen like wrestling, porn, and car crashes.

With rare exceptions, photographs printed in those magazines in the 1960s were black and white. Illustrations in the form of “artists’ conceptions” were black and white, restrained, sober, and not doctored, enhanced, or overblown. All those qualities were part of a frame of mind that was being weakened quite purposely in the 1960s by agitators for Hip and Hype.

In the decades since then, people who publish magazines like those agreed to water them down with cutesy features, “fun facts”, and gaudy, overblown color photographs and “artists’ conceptions”, all of it engineered to appeal to a mass audience, no longer a specialized audience of people knowledgeable in such matters. Then, whether because they were fools or liars, they had the effrontery to deny that they were part of the dumbing down trend. The frame of mind of publishers, editors, writers, and readers was now entirely different from what it had been only a few decades earlier.

When they are primed by overblown color blurbs to expect such things in the night sky but then fail to see them, people like the woman I know may conclude that there isn’t much there to be seen. Of course that is not so. What is there in the night sky is made to seem insignificant by comparison with the garish, overdone, overblown color photographs and illustrations that are now featured on Internet sites and in cutting-edge books, magazines, TV “documentaries”, and books “for” children. It is not the night sky but Hype-about-the-night-sky that Americans now permit to determine their frame of mind and their expectations. (more…)