SOME free polemic from The Anti-New York Times: [I]f Twitterer-In-Chief's juvenile cyber-blurbs are any indication, the road ahead may be very rocky.  “North Korea is behaving very badly,”he tweeted. Then added, “They have been ‘playing’ the United States for years. China has done little to help!” And who the frickety-frack is Orange Man [Trump] -- that self-professed champion of "national sovereignty" -- to lecture North Korea and China on what are purely their own domestic affairs? Why should North Korea disarm itself? How did that work out for Qaddafi of Libya? How does this aggressive posture serve the interests of the "America First" ideal that OM campaigned on and got elected with? And if these threats against Iran, North Korea, and, though subtly, China do not serve the American people, then who does benefit?

THIS presentation by Mike Maloney helps explain why families are not able to survive on one income anymore. Even those who have no personal debt are paying for massive, systematized indebtedness through inflation and taxes. Feminism, by making two-income families glamorous, puts a romantic gloss on debt bondage and a greater disparity in wealth.

Debt bondage relies on monetary illiteracy.

In the 1920s, the Social Credit movement emerged to address this problem. Social Credit missionaries, based in Quebec, went from door to door trying to educate people about the monetary system. Some still do as the St. Michael’s Pilgrims. One of social credit’s proponents Louis Even, author of In This Age of Plenty, wrote this description of the movements goals: (more…)

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

I have just re-read, as I do each year, one of the greatest novels of the last century and perhaps one that speaks more powerfully than any other to traditional Catholics about what really lays at the heart of our faith and what we have a right to expect from our shepherds. I speak of Graham Greene’s masterpiece: The Power and the Glory (1939).

The novel is a very rich one, interweaving many important themes relevant to both religious faith and the human condition which would require a book-length essay to do justice to it. Very broadly it is the story of the alcoholic “whisky priest” hunted for a number of years by the fiercely-anti Catholic government of a Mexican state that has confiscated Church property, outlawed the Mass and declared all priests to be, prima facie, traitors subject to execution upon capture. (more…)

ALAN writes:

One day more than ten years ago I was walking through an old Catholic cemetery in St. Louis.  I was in a frame of mind to do that because I knew that that cemetery is the final resting place for twenty-five people in my family and extended family.  I was taken there when my grandmother died in 1957, but I have no concrete memories from that day.

At its entrance is a two-story chapel mausoleum.  I walked into the building and read some of the names on the wall.  In one corner there was a name just above eye level.  It read “Stephanie Crane” and there was a small photograph of an attractive young woman with dark hair.  But what caught my attention were the years of her life: 1949-2002.  It struck me instantly:  She and I were contemporaries.  We were the same age.  She had been five weeks younger.  Yet there was her name in plain sight on that wall—and here was I, still walking around.  She died at age 52.  That moment had the effect of “concentrating the mind,” although my mind had already been concentrated by the loss of my parents in successive years.  What it meant to me was:  It is later than you think. (more…)

JAMES N. writes:

Another teacher-student sex story, of the sort that is depressingly familiar – although the running away is still rather uncommon. But what caught my attention was the quote far down in the article from “a family source:”  “It’s so hard to understand what would bring someone to do these kinds of things. I don’t understand how this is real life,” the source says.

But, of course, it’s EASY to understand what would bring someone (a man) to seek relations with a comely young woman, if society, and this family, knew anything about male sexuality, and someone who “doesn’t understand how this is real life” knows nothing about real life.

People who DID know about real life made sure that relations between the sexes were subject to stringent legal regulation, and strong social sanctions. (more…)

St. Patrick’s Day

All praise to Saint Patrick, who brought to our mountains
The gift of God’s faith, the sweet light of His love!
All praise to the shepherd who showed us the fountains
That rise in the heart of the Saviour above!
For hundreds of years, in smiles and in tears,
Our Saint has been with us, our shield and our stay;
All else may have gone, Saint Patrick alone,
He hath been to us light when earth’s lights were all set,
For the glories of Faith they can never decay;
And the best of our glories is bright with us yet,
In the faith and the feast of Saint Patrick’s Day. (more…)

CHARLES CARLSON, a Baptist deacon who is "pro-peace and pro-life," was recently interviewed by Judith Sharpe of In the Spirit of Chartres about his work against Christian Zionism. Carlson is part of the organization We Hold These Truths. The interview is available this month to listeners for free. I am a big fan of Mrs. Sharpe's interviews.  

It is one thing to acknowledge that racial and cultural diversity exists, that it poses challenges to any social order, and that we must deal with it as best we can. It is quite another thing to claim that diversity is the highest good, to be pursued as an end in itself. The former position leads to a realistic response to the circumstances in which we find ourselves; the latter to a quest for utopia that must involve the total reconstruction of the existing society.

— Lawrence Auster, Our Borders, Our Selves: America in the Age of Multiculturalism (more…)

TECHNICAL wizardry and sexual decadence are made for each other. "Gay" is a particularly inapt misnomer for a way of life marked by sin, loneliness, and self-disgust, not to mention disease and early death. --- Joseph Sobran

THE Anti-New York Times suggests alternatives to the Obamacare Lite proposal supported by Congressional Republicans and the Trump Administration:

1. Limit malpractice lawsuits against doctors and hospitals by establishing award limits. Cap lawyer fees at 10% and place the burden of proof on the plaintiff. …

2. Give doctors and hospitals a partial or full income-tax / corporate credit for treating those too poor to afford health insurance. (more…)

  HAIL Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. (Image courtesy of It's About Time)  

  THE Occupied Vatican recently celebrated the Communist holiday, International Women's Day.

  CHRISTOPHER Bollyn, author of Solving 9/11: The Deception that Changed the World, gave this recent talk in Jacksonville, Florida.

RON PAUL writes in his weekly column: President Trump’s escalation in Syria is doomed to failure. He is being drawn into a quagmire by the neocons that will destroy scores of lives, cost us a fortune, and may well ruin his presidency. He must de-escalate immediately before it is too late. The president has also escalated military involvement in Yemen. Read more here. Daniel McAdams writes: [A]lthough the US escalation in Yemen is sold back home as another aggressive front in the war against al-Qaeda, in fact US operations in Yemen are actually helping al-Qaeda as well as its chief sponsor, Saudi Arabia.

DAN R. writes:

Does the White House spokeswoman and married daughter of the strong social conservative Mike Huckabee really prefer to be called Ms. Sanders (example within link), as per the New York Times stylebook? Seemingly a small matter, and no doubt a complaint “a day late,” the use of the thoroughly modern term to the exclusion of the traditional Mrs. and Miss has become ubiquitous in mainstream media. It continues to rankle each time I notice it. In the case of the Times it is an annoyingly obvious measure of their dedication to political correctness. In the bigger picture it demeans and almost unconsciously alters the status of marriage, contributing to the overall rot. Taking it to the absurd, the worst-case example I can recall is in the credits of a movie remake, where the 14-year-old star is referred to in one of the credits as “Ms.” I think it’s safe to call it Gloria Steinem’s greatest “accomplishment.” (more…)

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

When I was just 17, many years ago, I met a very wise man who was then almost 100 and whom, unfortunately, I was only ever to meet that one time.

Rudolfo Cafiero came to Sydney in what was then still the British colony of New South Wales in the late 1890’s,  just a few years before federation, from his native Meta di Sorrento, on the Bay of Naples. He had been a ship’s captain like many in his wider family, but his own branch had traditionally been avvocati (lawyers), and magistrates. Each of his father and grandfather had served their community in both capacities.

After retiring from work, Rudolfo thereafter spent most of every day in his library. He was a noted recluse. On the day that I met him, he had come to our house because there was a party to celebrate my matriculation and my becoming the first in my family to win a place at University where, he had heard, I would study law. It was the legal connection that drew him.

Rudolfo spoke little to anyone but towards the end of the evening he approached me and said: “Stefano,” (35 years later and he remains the only person to have ever called me that) “Let me give you the same advice my father gave me as I set out on my path as a young man. He himself received the advice from his own father and it will aid you both as a lawyer and as a man.”

Rudolfo continued: “In all things in life be guided by the answer to the old riddle: If you count the tail as a leg, how many legs does a donkey have?” I  answered, “Five.” (more…)

ALAN writes:

In “When Feminity was Cherished” (March 6), you wrote that colleges once provided a setting that depended on strict rules. As a matter of fact, that is true. As a matter of morality, it was valid.

There is another setting that involves strict rules. It is called Life.  Life will not appease 18-year-olds who do not possess good judgment. Life is harsh. The conditions of life—“the rules” of life—will not accommodate the whims of spoiled brats.

There are two kinds of people:  Those who find life acceptable or even delightful and try to accommodate themselves to its conditions—its “rules”;  and those who resent the rules of life and try to make those rules accommodate their whims and fantasies. (more…)

IN CHAPTER 60 of Charles Dickens’s novel Oliver Twist, two very different women come together. They are Rose Maylie, the refined and beautiful adopted daughter of a prominent family, and Nancy, a prostitute who has lived on the streets of greedy London for most of her life. Nancy was trained at a young age to be a thief and is a member of Fagin’s pickpocket gang.

Nancy has come to see Rose in an effort to rescue Oliver from Fagin’s gang and the same life she has led. She knows she may be killed for doing so. As the type of person she is portrayed to be, she might have felt nothing but envy toward the beautiful Rose Maylie. But instead she is not too proud to be touched by the gentlewoman’s kindness. Rose could have felt nothing but disgust for a street walker, but instead her heart breaks with compassion.

It is a meeting between two entirely different worlds joined by something universal and eternal. They are both striving to be good. They both desire justice. They are both inspiring, without any of the neurotic narcissism of characters in modern novels and movies. Nancy’s words are a moving condemnation of the evil spirit of deformed capitalism which Dickens, perhaps more than any other author in the modern world, captured so well:

‘Oh, lady, lady!’ she said, clasping her hands passionately before her face, ‘if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me,—there would—there would!’

Nancy is subsequently murdered. Rose goes on to a brilliant marriage.

Here is the scene in its entirety:

The girl’s life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the woman’s original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered, and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame, and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with whom she had sought this interview.

But struggling with these better feelings was pride,—the vice of the lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and self-assured. The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,—even this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone connected her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so many, many traces when a very child.

She raised her eyes sufficiently to observe that the figure which presented itself was that of a slight and beautiful girl; then, bending them on the ground, she tossed her head with affected carelessness as she said: (more…)