MOST of the missiles fired at Syria this weekend did not hit the ground. There were no casualties and little damage. The Anti-New York Times has the most flattering interpretation of Trump's action: Notice the pattern: Trump "attacks" Syria in 2017 then, weeks later, cuts off funding to the CIA's "moderate rebels" just as Putin is bombing the crap out of them. Trump threatens to nuke North Korea. Now, he will be meeting with Lil' Kim in June! Trump declares "trade war" against China. Then, China removes some of its trade barriers (as Xi and Trump had surely already agreed upon during Trump's visit to China). Trump goes along with Congress's sanctions on Russia (which he cannot stop, anyway) and bashes Putin. He then announces that he wants to meet with Putin soon. Trump's strategy of rhetorical aggressiveness and harmless fireworks enables him to outmaneuver the warmongers -- keeping them silent as he pulls the rug out from under them. Be not alarmed by these strategic actions, boys and girls. Trump, Putin, Xi -- and by extension, Assad and Lil' Kim are all on the same team. For all we know, Trump may have even just bombed CIA targets!

PHILOSOPHY professor George Yancy plugs his new book in The New York Times: Do I give up on white people, on white America, or do I continue to fight for a better white America, despite the fact that my efforts continue to lead to forms of unspeakable white racist backlash? I am convinced that America suffers from a pervasively malignant and malicious systemic illness — white racism. There is also an appalling lack of courage, weakness of will, spinelessness and indifference in our country that helps to sustain it. That indifference is itself a cruel reality, a reality that often makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs until I fall flat on my face from exhaustion. That indifference makes me sick to my stomach. Plenty of evil white people will probably buy his book.

  Excellence is never an accident. It is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, and intelligent execution. --- ArchitectureRevival

  MEDITATIONS ON Good Shepherd Sunday by Father John Tauler, O.P. (Source): Now let us ask why our Lord so often calls His friends sheep. Because sheep have two qualities that our Lord especially loves, namely, innocence and gentle meekness. We read in the Apocalypse that the pure and guileless “follow the Lamb wherever He goes” (Apoc 14:4). The meek and humble of heart are near to God, and they hear His voice; proud and haughty men never hear it. When the wind howls and the doors and windows clatter, one can hardly hear the voice of man. As to the voice of God, that fatherly, whispered, secret word, uttered in the inmost depths of your soul—if you will hear it, you must be deaf to all the roar of the world without, and hush all the voices of your own inner life. You must yield yourself up like a meek and gentle little sheep, confess your sins, and, all humbly hushed and quieted, hearken to this voice of God; it is denied to all who are not thus made like unto sheep. It was to His sheep that the Lord spoke, as we read in the lessons of this night’s office: “I will give you a lovely land, the goodly inheritance of the army of the Gentiles. And I said: You shall call me Father and shall not cease to walk after me.” (Jer 3:19.) And what is this lovely land…

  JANICE KORTKAMP has studied the situation in Syria for years. In an interview with the website We Hold These Truths, she says, "The sad thing for me is that so few Americans know anything Syria." She has talked to many Syrians and says they are almost unanimous in their view that the American government has orchestrated the terrorist revolution in order to take control of their country. "That is a very bitter thing for them because Syria never threatened the U.S."

EXCELLENT analysis by Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams in this segment on the alleged gas attack in Syria. All the world’s a stage. Paul: “I don’t think we’re going to hear any more noise about bringing the troops home.” (more…)

  THIS video tells you a lot about the new encyclical released by the juvenile delinquent in Rome. It's called "Gaudete and Exsultate" ("Rejoice and Be Glad"), "joy" being a familiar sugar coating on the theological poisons of a cunning revolutionary. The sublime has been replaced by social work, sin has been replaced by "injustice," wisdom by slick, humanistic sentimentality. In short, God has been replaced by man. All in all, it's about as evocative of holiness and its internal combats as a life insurance commercial.

ALAN writes:

If an astronomer looked up one evening and saw that a bright star that had been there for ages is no longer there, he might say, “The universe has changed.”

That was approximately how I felt at the moment last week after I walked into a branch library in St. Louis and paused to look at an exhibit of railroad photographs in a display case.  One of the staff members came over to where I was standing and said he had something to tell me.  What he said was the last thing in the world I would have expected to hear: “Mary passed away…..”

It was one of those moments when you stand there, stunned, and want so much not to believe what you have just been told. Those few words caused my universe to change.

Mary had worked in that library for 28 years.  She died from natural causes at age 53, and her death, wholly unexpected, came as a shock to everyone who knew her.

In this age of outrageous excess and overstatement, the word friend is greatly overused and misused.  Mary and I were friends, in the proper sense of the word, for all those years. (more…)

THOUGHTS on ordinary singing by Webster Young: An important part of the joy of song is that we use our own voice to make it. We need no machines– only our solitary voice, which no one can take away from us. This is part of the joy – the difference between one’s own voice, so natural and a part of us, and the juggernaut of modern industrial technology. When all the batteries have run dead, all the transistors and resistors worn out, when all the radios in the world are ruined and thrown away, you will still have your voice, the perfect human answer to oppressive technology. If we find our own song, one that really uplifts us, we have a very effective weapon against the trials and tribulations of life.

  NASIM AGHDAM, the woman allegedly involved in what appeared to be a comically staged shooting at Youtube headquarters, does squats joyfully and energetically before her national flag, and to the tune of "Hava Nagila," in this video. Miss Aghdam is probably on an island beach somewhere right now resting up from her "suicide." "Hava de guns, Hava de guns, Hava de guns and we be happy."

  AND as regards contraceptives, there is a paradoxical, negative sense in which all possible future generations are the patients or subjects of a power wielded by those already alive. By contraception simply, they are denied existence; by contraception used as a means of selective breeding, they are, without their concurring voice, made to be what one generation, for its own reasons, may choose to prefer. From this point of view, what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. It is, of course, a commonplace to complain that men have hitherto used badly, and against their fellows, the powers that science has given them. But that is not the point I am trying to make. I am not speaking of particular corruptions and abuses which an increase of moral virtue would cure: I am considering what the thing called ‘Man’s power over Nature’ must always and essentially be. No doubt, the picture could be modified by public ownership of raw materials and factories and public control of scientific research. But unless we have a world state this will still mean the power of one nation over others. And even within the world state or the nation it will mean (in principle) the power of majorities over minorities, and {in the concrete} of a government over the people. And all long-term exercises of power, especially in…

  Is the cult of liberty the desire to free man from the excesses of government in regulating the lives of the citizens? No, because the facts of history tell us otherwise. The world has never known more oppressive governments or bigger governments than those which profess the cult of liberty. No governments have meddled more in the lives of their citizens. Since the abolition of the monarchies and the rise of democracies, the common man, the family and business have been subject to tyrannical oppression, emaciating taxation, as well as economic and social “engineering” which affects every aspect of life. The democracies of the past two hundred years make the most dictatorial monarchical regimes look like liberty fests. With democracy have come both liberalism and socialism, two sources of oppression for hundreds of millions of people, if not billions, over the past two hundred years.  This fact tells us that the liberty which the cult of liberty seeks is not the freedom of the common man from big, oppressive, and tyrannical governments. It is a freedom from something else which the cult of liberty seeks. --- "The Cult of Liberty," The Most Rev. Donald J. Sanborn

ALEX WITOSLAWSKI responds to recent commentary by Jordan Peterson on Jewish influence and success in America. This is an excellent rejoinder to Peterson, who seriously damaged his intellectual integrity on this issue. Witoslawski writes:

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a fan of Dr. Jordan Peterson. His message about “cleaning your room” is spot on—everyone should seek to get their personal lives in order before they focus too heavily on activism. What he said about the power of speaking the truth helped forever change my life—it led me to embrace more radical ideas and advocate for them at great personal cost. And despite Peterson’s unverified claims about how he turned “thousands” of young men away from the alt-right, I know of several friends who followed a similar path from Peterson to more dissident right-wing ideas—and none who went the other way.

Regardless, the point here is that I have great respect for Jordan Peterson. But my respect for him did make his recent blog post about the Jewish Question so much more disappointing to me. Not because I disagree with Peterson on this issue—I can handle disagreement with others just fine, and to be honest I expect him to hold the views that he does because if he didn’t, he’d almost certainly get kicked off of Google, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and every credit card payment processor, lose positive coverage from Fox News, and probably get prosecuted for some kind of “hate speech” in Canada. In short, I don’t expect everyone to agree on the Jewish Question, and I don’t expect those who do to publicly come out and discuss it, because the personal cost of doing so is often too great.

No, it wasn’t my disagreement with Dr. Peterson that I found disappointing, but rather the unfair and, quite frankly, emotionally unhinged way that he covered the Jewish Question. Instead of giving his views in a fair and respectful manner, he was quick to poison the well by implying that anyone who disagrees with him is an evil pathological loser who believes in crazy conspiracy theories. Nothing could be further from the truth. [cont.]

(Disclaimer: As with all links at this website, this is not a blanket endorsement of content at the linked site.) (more…)

PHILIP GIRALDI writes for Unz Review:

If you want to understand what the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States really means consider the fact that Israeli Army snipers shot dead seventeen unarmed and largely peaceful Gazan demonstrators on Good Friday without a squeak coming out of the White House or State Department. Some of the protesters were shot in the back while running away, while another 1,000 Palestinians were wounded, an estimated 750 by gunfire, the remainder injured by rubber bullets and tear gas.

The offense committed by the Gazan protesters that has earned them a death sentence was coming too close to the Israeli containment fence that has turned the Gaza strip into the world’s largest outdoor prison. President Donald Trump’s chief Middle East negotiator David Greenblatt described the protest as “a hostile march on the Israel-Gaza border…inciting violence against Israel.” And Nikki Haley at the U.N. has also used the U.S. veto to block any independent inquiry into the violence, demonstrating once again that the White House team is little more than Israel’s echo chamber. America’s enabling of the brutal reality that is today’s Israel makes it fully complicit in the war crimes carried out against the helpless and hapless Palestinian people.

Pro-Israel spin

So where was the outrage in the American media about the massacre of civilians? Characteristically, Israel portrays itself as somehow a victim and the U.S. media, when it bothers to report about dead Palestinians at all, picks up on that line.  (more…)

THE CANADIAN author Michael O’Brien is an eloquent critic of the occult influences on children today, especially through fantasy literature. O’Brien is author of A Landscape With Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind (Ignatius) and Harry Potter and the Paganization of Culture (Fides et Traditio) . In a 2001 interview with Zenit.org, he summarized his objections to J.K. Rowling’s works. His points are relevant to much of popular culture:

Q: Many are critical of the Harry Potter books because they claim it is dangerous to expose children to witchcraft and the occult. What is your reaction to this?

O’Brien: I have read the four volumes of the Harry Potter series three times, and with each reading the serious defects of the novels appear in clearer light.

The most obvious problem, of course, is the author’s use of the symbol-world of the occult as her primary metaphor, and occultic activities as the dramatic engine of the plots. It presents these to the child reader through attractive role models, such as Harry and Hermione, who are students of witchcraft and sorcery. This has the potential of lowering a child’s guard—both subconscious and spiritual—to actual occult activity, which is everywhere and growing.

Rationally, children know that the fantasy element in the books is not “real.” But emotionally and subconsciously the young reader absorbs it as real. This is further complicated by the fact that in the world around us there are many opportunities for young people to enter the occult subcultures, where some of Harry’s powers are indeed offered as real.

Q: Critics of Harry Potter see a big difference between authors such as Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who, they argue, use magical elements in a Christian way, and the books of J.K. Rowling, where magic is presented in a Gnostic and pagan fashion.

O’Brien: The differences are great, I would say absolute. The resemblance between the works of Christian fantasy writers and Rowling is only superficial. Yes, there is “magic” in both. Yet Tolkien and Lewis repeatedly warn about the danger of magic throughout their novels. (more…)

EASTER
— George Herbert

Rise heart; thy Lord is risen. Sing his praise
Without delayes,
Who takes thee by the hand, that thou likewise
With him mayst rise:
That, as his death calcined thee to dust,
His life may make thee gold, and much more, just.

Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part
With all thy art.
The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,
Who bore the same.
His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key
Is best to celebrate this most high day. (more…)

IN 1885, excavation of a building site on the Quirinal Hill in Rome uncovered an extraordinary remnant of the past. It was the Boxer at Rest, a life-size bronze statue from Ancient Greece, probably dating to the late fourth century, depicting a boxer resting between bouts. You can see him in this photo sitting on the earth at the excavation site and looking very much alive.

It was common then to uncover artifacts of antiquity underground — and any significant discoveries automatically belonged to the city of Rome — but this was far different from the typical find. One of the archaeologists working on the site recalled the amazing discovery:

“I have witnessed, in my long career in the active field of archaeology, many discoveries; I have experienced surprise after surprise; I have sometimes and most unexpectedly met with real masterpieces; but I have never felt such an extraordinary impression as the one created by the sight of this magnificent specimen of a semi-barbaric athlete, coming slowly out of the ground, as if awakening from a long repose after his gallant fights.”

I was fortunate to see this masterpiece when I went to the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome this winter. I can attest to Rodolfo Lanciani’s impression. This is one of the most powerful and unforgettable of sculptures. When walking into the room in which it is displayed, one can’t help but be taken aback, as if one is in the presence of a living person, though from 2,400 years ago. The boxer, with blood on his head and leg, one eye bruised, is seated with his arms resting on his knees and his head tilted upward, as athletes who have just been through some great exertion often do to catch their breath. The statue probably once included eyes in stone but they are now gone. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art described it:

The boxer is represented just after a match. His muscular body and full beard are those of a mature athlete, and his thick neck, lanky legs, and long arms are well suited to the sport. His face exhibits bruises and cuts. His lips are sunken as though his teeth have been pushed in or knocked out. His broken nose and cauliflower ears are common conditions of boxers, probably the result of previous fights, but the way he is breathing through his mouth and the bloody cuts to his ears and face make clear the damage inflicted by his most recent opponent. The muscles of his arms and legs are tense as though, despite the exhaustion of competition, he is ready to spring up and face the next combatant.

The way he is sitting — as if poised to jump up again — suggests resilience, determination and intense preparation. Judging from his exhaustion, whomever this boxer’s opponent was, he wasn’t going to give up easily either. And that is what is inspiring — this boxer will continue until he has nothing left. He has given everything for this revered ancient sport and it isn’t just a game.

I thought of this sculpture today when visiting the grave of the writer Lawrence Auster, friend and colleague who died of pancreatic cancer five years ago today, in the early morning hours of Good Friday, 2013 and is buried at Sts. Peter and Paul Cemetery in Springfield, Pennsylvania. I thought of it not just because Mr. Auster admired Ancient Greek culture and would probably have liked this statue very much, but because he too was a tireless fighter. He could certainly throw a punch, not in the boxing ring but in the arena of cultural warfare, and he could get up again, even after he was beaten. Years of intense study had prepared him for battle.

That preparation is over. He too is now a boxer at rest.

But we can still appreciate, and participate in, the fight. Mr. Auster’s work is available as always at his website, View from the Right, much of it as timely as ever, and will be published in book form soon.

I hope others will be inspired by his combativeness for many years to come.

May his friends never forget his efforts. And may his soul, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

(more…)

  "[A]S NO one can handle flour without carrying some of it about with her, so no one can meditate devoutly and assiduously on the Passion without deriving great fruit therefrom.” --- St. Gertrude