BARBARA WELLS SARUDY writes of the oral history memoir of Edward O’Neill, who grew up in the 1850s-60s in Brookfield, Massachusetts. This memoir speaks of a world so different from what is experienced by most American children today, surfeited as they are with gadgetry and toys while denied the uplifting mystique of Christmas (the “Christ Mass”) and many other good things, such as siblings, free time and family stability. Edward O’Neill lived in a better time:

“The first Christmas I remember was when I was four years old. The reason I remember it was because my mother gave me a big lump of brown sugar with a few drops of peppermint on it. I nibbled at that sugar a little bit at a time all day long and I can taste that peppermint to this day. You see, we were sort of pioneer people and we didn’t have much – nor not much to get anything with. Every winter in my early days was hard times.

“The only other present my mother had to give that Christmas was a quarter of a dried orange peel and she give it to my sister to put in her bureau drawer to make her clothes smell sweet. My father didn’t know much about Christmas. He’d been brought up by the Indians. His parents had been killed by redskins and he lived with the Indians until he was nearly twenty. My mother’s parents were missionaries and of course she knew all about Christmas. (more…)

IN CHINA, fake goods are often investigated by fake investigators. From the Associated Press: One of the world's largest consumer goods companies hired an investigator to track down counterfeit anti-dandruff shampoo. But instead of finding real counterfeiters, the investigator, Wang Yunming, set up a factory to produce counterfeit shampoo himself, which he then "seized" and billed to the firm as a successful raid, according to two employees involved in the investigation who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs. It wasn't the first such factory Wang founded. It was the fourth.

RESEARCHERS at the University of California, Berkeley, and Brown, have conducted an extremely important study. They have analyzed over 37,000 senior yearbooks from 1905 to 2013, carefully measuring the depth of smiles in yearbook portraits over time, The Washington Post reports. They did all this to find out what we, at this obscure website, found out a long time ago, without any grants or employing anyone: People smile much more than they once did. The smile, in fact, is mandatory.

“[H]appiness has replaced seriousness as the default emotion for photography, and for portraiture in general,” Jeff Guo writes.

Today, we mock portraits that look too intense or self-serious or vain. It’s hard to imagine that a century ago, what many people found ridiculous was the smile.

And:

“In the fine arts a grin was only characteristic of peasants, drunkards, children, and halfwits, suggesting low class or some other deficiency,” [Historian Christina] Kotchemidova writes, citing research from historian Fred Schroeder.

Shallowness has been often blamed here, but a dentist speculated that the rise of the smile was due to advances in his field. Why did George Washington look so serious? He had bad teeth. Another reader, Jeff W., said socialism leads to all smiles all the time. He wrote: (more…)

FROM HenryMakow.com:

All off the intelligence agencies and secret services, to include first and foremost the aforementioned “nexus of the CIA, MI6, DGSE and MOSSAD”, have a common home in Switzerland. Switzerland is not only the most protected banking capital in the world as demonstrated by its unique neutrality status during WWII, as well as home to the highly secretive BSI (Bank for International Settlements), it is also the true home of the headquarters of the CIA (aka The Company). (more…)

  FROM the Introit for the Mass of the Third Sunday in Advent (Philippians iv 4-6): Rejoice in the Lord always: again I say, rejoice. Let your modesty be known to all men: for the Lord is nigh. Be nothing solicitous: but in everything by prayer let your petitions be known to God. Ps. Lord thou hast blessed Thy land: Thou has turned away the captivity of Jacob. v. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.

  IN 1985, Yuri Bezmenov, Soviet KGB agent and journalist who had defected to the West in disgust at the Soviets' efforts to destabilize other nations, gave an interview to G. Edward Griffin of the John Birch Society about KGB activity in the United States. If you have not seen this interview before, you are in for an eye-opener with this 13-minute clip. (The full interview can be seen here.) Bezmenov said that most of the Soviet intelligence agency's activities involved disinformation and propaganda, not espionage. The goal was "demoralization." So successful had these efforts been since the 1960s that America was already an occupied nation, he said, and it was only a matter of time before its destruction was complete. The Marxist-Leninist program he described is that of the Judaic organized crime syndicate that now runs America and is bringing us closer every day to catastrophic war and the American version of the Red Terror. Notice what Bezmenov said about those idealists and "half-baked intellectuals" who supported the program. They will be lined up against a wall someday, he said, and shot. "Feminists are useful idiots, and are doomed."

ALAN writes:

“America is an Occupied Nation”, a recent item asserted.

That is true.  But how could it be otherwise?  On what grounds could a nation of Eloi lay claim to a better fate?

Americans’ enemies’ plans to make America over into a Socialist Republic have been known for more than a hundred years.  The Fabians declared their goals openly, and so did the Communists in years long before anyone reading these words was born.  They told the truth about their plans.  But most Americans paid no attention to them.

Making America into an Occupied Nation likely proved far easier for them than they may have imagined.

When Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee warned Americans about powerful Jews and war agitators wanting to drag Americans into World War II, they were promptly demonized by the Communist-friendly FDR.

When Senators McCarran and McCarthy said that Communists were entrenched in the federal government, they were promptly demonized by the mass communications industry. (more…)

FOUR people who were allegedly at the scene of the San Bernardino shootings last week told mainstream news reporters in the immediate aftermath of the shootings that what they saw was very different from the widely reported scenario. These interviews are not being widely broadcast or pursued by the mainstream outlets. Two people said they saw white military-style commandos with guns, not the dark-skinned Syed Farook and his petite, 90-pound wife. See the interview with the witness, Juan Hernandez, here. Scott Creighton reported on another witness:

CBS News did an interview with a witness, Sally Abdelmageed, via the phone right after the attack. What she described was:

“[T]hree men, dressed in all black, military attire with vests on holding assault rifles and one of them opened up the door to building three… and he… opens up the door to building three and … he… starts to spray, shoot all over into the room… I couldn’t see a face, he had a black hat on (mask) and uh, from my view all I could see was a black hat (mask) and long sleeve shirt… black cargo pants with zippers on the sides, big puffy pockets, he had a huge assault rifle and extra ammo… I just saw three dressed exactly the same…. their skin tone looked white. They looked like they were athletic build. They appeared to be tall…”

The men Hernandez and Abdelmageed saw may have looked like these military mercenaries allegedly seen fleeing the scene of the Boston Marathon bombing.

A third eyewitness in San Bernardino said he saw what seemed to be one of the gunmen in a car fleeing the scene and he was white.  (more…)

  "POPE" Francis and his counterfeit church in Rome deserve credit for doing everything humanly possible to let the world know they are not Catholic. The latest is a "climate change" light show on the exterior walls of St. Peter's Basilica today. This hideous spectacle, during the second week of Advent and on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, brought cheesy totalitarian art to a new level. It was called "Fiat Lux: Illuminating Our Common Home" and was put together by the UN-affiliated World Bank Group, Paul G. Allen’s Vulcan Inc., the Li Ka Shing Foundation, Obscura, and Okeanos. What do any of these outfits have to do with the Catholic Church? Nothing. The whole thing reeks of globalist corporate branding. These are the same people responsible for an equally ugly light show on the Empire State Building this summer that featured endangered animals and the Hindu goddess Kali (below). It's a lot easier to care about cute animals and bad weather than about temptation, sin and spiritual combat. But ultimately this isn't about the extinction of snow leopards and whales. It's about power --- not for the Church, but for the consortium of banks and global government agencies that will come to the rescue in the alleged climate crisis. "Pope" Francis, with the publication of his environmentalist encyclical letter Laudato Si, has been busy creating the religious branch of the UN and this is his artistic statement, ugliness being one of the signature characteristics of the…

I WAS fortunate enough to hear a university choir perform Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff’s wonderful Bògòroditse Devo yesterday and since today is the Eve of the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I thought you might enjoy it. It is based on the Hail Mary and is from the composer’s vespers. An English translation of the Russian lyrics:

Rejoice, O mother of God.
Virgin Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee;
blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb,
for thou hast borne the Saviour of our souls. (more…)

AMAZON has removed it and the website Infowars has mysteriously deleted an article about the ban. Nobody Died at Sandy Hook is a new book that appears to hit too close to home. It is now available free in pdf format. Skip the introduction, and go right to some of the articles in this compilation edited by Mike Palecek and Jm Fetzer. I recommend "Top Ten Reasons: Sandy Hook Was an Elaborate Hoax," by Dr. Vivien Leigh, starting on page 57. “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” –Sherlock Holmes (“The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet”)

DON VINCENZO writes:

On Wednesday, I will, once again, travel to the Supreme Court building to hear Round II of (Abigail) Fisher v. the U. Texas. Fisher, who is white, sued the U. Texas in 2008 over a university policy that denied her admission, but granted black and Hispanic students with lower Grade Point Averages and tests scores access to the university. Fisher claimed that she was denied admission because race was not “a,” but “the,” standard used in in selecting students who are not in the top 10% of their class. (more…)

IN this entry about the Pentagon’s decision to admit women to all combat roles — a decision which was clearly foreordained before the bureaucratic charade of testing women to see if they could do it  — a reader explains why women do not belong in combat even if a minority of brave and strong Amazons can actually do it. His comments are in response to another reader who maintains that women can perform well in certain military roles.

Pete writes:

[T]he argument that a “few females could do it all” is wholly insufficient to justify inclusion of women in the combat arms, and even in many combat support/service billets. Here’s why: Men act – and perhaps more-importantly, bond — differently in a co-ed environment than they do in the presence of other males.

Elite all-male military formations are characterized by brotherly love, i.e., the willingness of individual soldiers (Marines, airmen, sailors, etc.) to “take a bullet” for one another. The espirit d’corps of traditional (male only) units depends wholly upon trust, shared sacrifice and the notion that each man is shouldering his share of the danger, risk and hardship associated with military service – up to and including combat.

Moreover, enlisted men trust their officer leaders only when they fulfill a very specific set of criteria – namely, leaders (whether NCOs or officers) must be seen as being the best at everything they do. Bluntly, the men must see their leaders as alpha and not beta males. Second, leaders must be seen to share the same hardships and dangers as the men they would lead. Third, the true leader never asks his men to do something he himself is incapable of doing or unwilling to do. At the very least, he may no longer do those things, but he once did. Finally, the true leader puts the needs and welfare of his men before his own. He doesn’t eat, he doesn’t sleep – until the needs of his men have been addressed. He is the first on the field of battle and the last off of it. Although rank hath its privileges, he cannot be seen to enjoy too many comforts his men do without – or he risks losing respect of his men.

The introduction of women into heretofore all-male formations is enormously destructive to the unit cohesion, espirit d’corps and morale of those units – and this outcome is independent of the capabilities, talents and skills of the females themselves. The very presence of women profoundly alters the willingness of men to trust one another, sacrifice for one another and ultimately, risk harm and/or death for another.

The strength of the wolf really is the pack – and that pack is male. (more…)

HAS there been a major glitch in the staging of a massacre (in which real people may have been killed) in San Bernardino, California? The family of the Muslim man accused of being the terrorist responsible for the attack says none of it adds up. Could it be that this family’s possible failure to cooperate was not considered in advance? Did the inconceivably evil practitioners of political theater who are engaging in criminal acts of treason and psychological manipulation by staging mass shootings mess up?

William N. Grigg writes at Activist Post:

The question of how Sayed Farook could have mutated into a human monster capable of mass murder is just one of many questions plaguing the family of the man accused of carrying out Tuesday’s terrorist attack in San Bernardino. In an interview with CNN, the family’s attorney describes numerous ways that the official story of that horrible crime “doesn’t add up.”

“There’s a lot of disconnects, and there’s a lot of unknowns, and a lot of things that quite frankly don’t add up,” insisted attorney David S. Chelsey, who represents Farooq’s family when asked by CNN correspondent Chris Cuomo how the family “could explain how he went from someone they knew and loved to someone who could do something so monstrous.”

Witnesses and investigators have both described a terrorist onslaught carried out with military precision by suspects who were trained and capable. Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, didn’t appear to have the necessary background and skillset, according to Chelsey.

He expressed particular skepticism that Malik, who was nursing a newborn child, was suitable to carry out a depraved mission of that kind: “She was only about ninety pounds, so it’s unlikely she could even carry a weapon, or wear some type of a vest, or do any of this.”

The most provocative claim made by Chelsey dealt with the condition of the alleged terrorists when their bodies were found:

Where the couple was found, from what I understand, is that they were handcuffed, lying face-down in this truck, shot up.

The macabre photos provided by the police do indeed show Tashfeen Malik lying face down with her hands cuffed. Since when do police shoot people in handcuffs? Since the American police state was fully installed. (more…)

MORE on the interview with Emma Parkinson, the jolly Australian survivor of the Bataclan attack, can be found here. The movie-style production of these interviews is telling — and nauseating.

In related news, Brandon Martinez writes about “The Implausible ‘Cellphone in the Trashbin’ Story” and this closed-circuit video in the opening minute shows what appears to be a female customer of the Paris restaurant, Café Le Nostra, tossing an incendiary device through the window in the moments after the cafe was attacked, suggesting she was an operative of some kind, not an ordinary customer. (Analysis provided here by poster who deserves credit for this find, but skip the first full minute and be forewarned, there is minor profanity.) (more…)

RUSTY M. writes:

I don’t understand how this federal money creation scheme works. I thought that the banks created credit (money) based on the federal government’s promises to repay via tax collections. That wouldn’t be “money from thin air,” so there must be some other razzmatazz going on that that phrase refers to.

(more…)

NOW that the Pentagon has approved women in all combat roles, it is only fair that women be required to register with the Selective Service and and be drafted in the event of war. Army Secretary John McHugh acknowledged as much this fall. According to the New York Post, on Oct. 24th:

McHugh, speaking at an Army conference this week in Washington, DC, said draft registration — while just one element of US military operations — “will be one of those things that will have to be considered.”

“If we find ourselves as a military at large where men and women have equal opportunity, as I happen to believe they should, serving in combat positions at least on a formal basis … then ultimately the question of extending the selective service requirements to women as well will have to at least be discussed,” McHugh said.

There is no reasonable argument for excluding women. The privileges of military service should come with the duties. Extension of the draft must be approved by Congress. Start preparing your daughters for military service. Let them play with plastic soldiers instead of dolls. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

This is the logical conclusion of the drive already well under way when Ford (which means Nixon, really) forcibly coeducated the service academies in 1976, lying already about maintaining standards as Carter does today, but it’s none the less insane for that.

If I were a Russian or Chicom Marshal – or a bloody-minded jihadi – I should be having a hearty belly-laugh at this Yankee folly… But I’m an American vet, so I remember better days and tell myself that what can’t last, won’t.

From The New York Times:

In a historic transformation of the American military, Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said on Thursday that the Pentagon will open all combat jobs to women.

“There will be no exceptions,” Mr. Carter said at a news conference. (more…)