AT THIS time of year, in our humble garden, I sometimes see a bumblebee stationed on a flower, smack in the middle of a blossom, unmoving. It is very striking, this sight, because bees are usually, so, well, busy. But the bee does not move. Is he exhausted? Is he drunk? Is he drinking the last dregs of nectar and maybe even some dew, which must be delicious at this time of year?

I did a little research. I found out that bees do take naps on flowers, which are warmer than the surrounding air. And at this time of year, the workers are old and dying, the air is cooler, and so they might be sleepier than normal. What a great place to take a nap! Right in the heart of petals, swaying lightly in the breeze.

According to the poet, Fr. John Bannister Tabb, the bee is collecting his due, not the dew.

 The Tax Gatherer

‘And pray, who are you?’
Said the violet blue
To the Bee, with surprise
At his wonderful size,
In her eye-glass of dew.

‘I, madam,’ quoth he,
‘Am a publican Bee,
Collecting the tax
On honey and wax.
Have you nothing for me?’

Fr. John Bannister Tabb

Here is a picture — a poor one — of a sleeping tax collector outside our window.

Saint Dominic Receives the Rosary (detail)/ Plautilla Nelli

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ON OCTOBER 9, 1774 while he was in Philadelphia for the First Continental Congress, John Adams walked into a Roman Catholic chapel as a diversion from the pressing matters of politics. There he found Catholics praying the rosary during Mass.

He was disgusted. After all, he envisioned a world in which such superstitions would be abolished — and he set about institutionalizing such a world politically.

He wrote to his wife, Abigail:

This afternoon, led by curiosity and good company, I strolled away to mother church, or rather grandmother church. I mean the Romish chapel. I heard a good, short moral essay upon the duty of parents to their children, founded in justice and charity, to take care of their interests, temporal and spiritual. This afternoon’s entertainment was to me most awful and affecting; the poor wretches fingering their beads, chanting Latin, not a word of which they understood; their pater nosters and ave Marias; their holy water; their crossing themselves perpetually; their bowing to the name of Jesus, whenever they hear it; their bowings, kneelings and genuflections before the altar. The dress of the priest was rich white lace. His pulpit was velvet and gold. The altar-piece was very rich, little images and crucifixes about; wax candles lighted up. But how shall I describe the picture of our Savior in a frame of marble over the altar, at full length, upon the cross in the agonies, and the blood dropping and streaming from his wounds! The music, consisting of an organ and a choir of singers, went all the afternoon except sermon time, and the assembly chanted most sweetly and exquisitely.

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear, and imagination–everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell. Adieu.

Today, on the Feast of the Holy Rosary, it is truly marvelous to reflect on the survival of the rosary beads Adams refers to, this “mystical garland,” in a world in which the “enlightened” views of Adams have been dominant for hundreds of years. Read More »

YOU MAY still be seeing unauthorized ads on this site. Hoping to get it fixed soon. I’m at the mercy of people who know more about this than I do.

ALAN writes:

When I was 49, people started calling me “the old man.”  That was not so much because I “looked old” as because they sensed (correctly) that I had no desire to be hip and cool, as they were and as they imagined everyone else wants to be.

That was twenty years ago.  By now, I must be ancient.  Splendid.  That should qualify me to write the following.

             “There isn’t much that I have learned, through all my foolish years. Except that life keeps runnin’ in cycles.  First there’s laughter, then those tears…..”

                                           — Frank Sinatra, “Cycles”

I beg to differ with the lyric of that understated 1968 ballad sung so superbly by Frank Sinatra and which I have always enjoyed hearing. I have learned a great deal “through all my foolish years.”

I learned that there are six tribes of human beings: Read More »

Children’s author Roald Dahl

SEAN NAUGHTON, in the latest issue of Culture Wars magazine, looks at the life and works of the famous children’s book author Roald Dahl, of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame. Naughton calls Dahl the “bad granddad of children’s literature.” (If you don’t have a subscription to Culture Wars, you can buy the October issue for only $4. This article is well worth the price.)

He writes:

Like any good grandfather, Dahl really does want to bring joy to the children; as with his own five children to whom Dahl first told the tales as bed-time stories, his young readers are plied with an intoxicating, psychedelic cocktail of possibilities and i

mages and wordplay. But for all the phizzwizardry of his tales and for all the whoopsy-wiffling of his telling, each of his gloriumptious confections has an unmistakable bitterness in the coating and a deadly poison at the centre. For all the deftness of his writing and the playfulness of his story-telling, Roald Dahl cannot hide the cruelty of his gaze, nor the coldness and cruelty of his merciless, iconoclastic heart.

He cannot hide these things because he does not see them himself. He thinks that all the voyeurism and vengeance in his books is just childish fun. This is because he himself never grew up. I think the same can be said of his adoring fans. He remained all his life a playful, treat loving, self-centred child, with a loose tongue and a taste for revenge. There is something monstrous about a grown man who is clever and powerful but remains at heart a vengeful child. There is something monstrous about Roald Dahl. Bad Granddad. Read More »

LIBERALISM entails the constant promotion of sexual freedom interrupted by incapacitating seizures of Puritanical outrage over the effects of sexual freedom whenever the constant promotion of sexual freedom is even remotely threatened. Read More »

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WHAT IF every American received a modest stipend from the government, sufficient for all basic needs and health care — distributed not through taxation but by the issuance of currency by the government. Consider “social credit,” the ingenious, thought-provoking economic system invented by the engineer Clifford Hugh Douglas to alleviate the joblessness caused by advanced technology and the money-lessness caused by central banking.

Robert Klinck looks at the social and psychological effects of a “social credit” dividend:

It is important to recognize the change in the social environment—in all areas of human relations and endeavour—that such a policy would effect.

     Knowing that you have a dependable source of income relieves the kind of destructive stress that manifests as psychological harm and disease. The edge would be taken off the desperate, often virtually life or death, aspect of competition for income-providing positions.

     Knowing that you have an economic backstop liberates you from participating in economic activity that you judge to be unethical or otherwise harmful.

     Having confidence that you will always have the monetary means of survival removes a common motive to commit crimes, including committing suicide, which are notoriously more common during so-called economic slowdowns. Read More »

Solange Hertz

“THE Declaration of Independence states:

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new government …

“Here is formal canonization of revolution. In the face of it, to insist that Church and state must – or can – remain separate is to make every citizen a moral schizophrenic. To tell him it’s ‘self-evident’ that all men are created equal leads him to deny the evidence of his senses; to tell him that authority comes only from the people, is to make of him a formal revolutionary with a mandate to turn against any authority that doesn’t suit him. This is why ‘democracy,’ doomed from the beginning, is even now disintegrating beyond repair.”

— Solange Herz, The Star-Spangled Heresy: Americanism (Kindle Locations 5500-5507). Tumblar House.

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BISHOP Donald Sanborn, who openly rejects the fake papacies of recent years, weighs in on the Kavanaugh case. Bishop Sanborn is also — like me — indifferent to the outcome of Kavanaugh’s nomination. At the same time, he examines the violations of decency and due process involved.

There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding about Kavanaugh’s future if he joins the Supreme Court. He will not be overturning Roe v Wade, as he himself acknowledged. Furthermore, the GOP continues to be essentially a pro-abortion party despite its own platform. As the Protestant columnist Chuck Baldwin writes:

[W]hen Republicans say we must wait for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe (remember it was a Republican Supreme Court that passed Roe, and the Supreme Court has been dominated by Republican appointments ever since), they are spouting utter balderdash. Under Article. III. Section. 2. of the U.S. Constitution, a genuine pro-life Congress and White House could overturn Roe v Wade anytime it wanted to. The only reason the Republican Party hasn’t overturned Roe is because it hasn’t wanted to overturn Roe.

And, incredibly, there are millions of Christians and conservatives who continue to believe that the GOP is pro-life. Is this stupidity, naïveté or what exactly? Read More »

EVERY child should know he has a divine protector.

Angel, O Angel,
Close by me stay.
Tenderly guard me for I am thy child.

And every adult has one too. Of course, you can’t acknowledge that truth in the world, the fake world where to have a supernatural friend and protector is a laughable superstition, but you can acknowledge it here, in the real world where illusions are despised.

My most zealous protector and dear angel guardian, I pray thee, by the charge which God hath given thee to guard me in all my ways, as a mother carries in her arms her beloved child, avert from me all occasions of sin, and preserve me from all perils which could make me offend God, and for that, repress the temptations of the infernal enemy and my own passions, so that having conquered the enemies of my salvation, I may walk with ease, by the grace of God, in the way of His commandments, till I die. 

    —- [Novena to Our Guardian Angel]

Dr. Thomas Droleskey reflects on this, the Feast of Our Holy Guardian Angels.

Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God’s love commits me here, ever this day be at my side, to light and to guard, to rule and to guide. Amen.

Perugia Tryptich (detail), Fra Angelico

“HAS EVERY child of Adam a Guardian Angel? Yes, every one without exception, as long as his probation lasts–Heathens and Christians, princes and beggars, the idiot as well as the man of genius, the little child just born into the world as well as the old man on the verge of the grave. What respect this should give us for others! How we should tremble before the anger of their Guardian Angels, and count ourselves happy to win their approval! Read More »

Christine Blasey Ford

STEPHEN IPPOLITO writes from Australia:

Is Dr. Christine Blasey Ford just sui generis or is she perhaps representative of a whole class of female academics and professional women in the U.S. today who, while intellectually bright and professionally accomplished, have become infantilised and fragile? That would be inevitable when one is raised to believe that to be a Western woman is to be everywhere and all the time a victim.

I don’t want to sound unkind, but I surely can’t be the only one to have seen Christine Blasey Ford give her statement to the Senate select committee and come away baffled by just how very immature she seemed – especially, but not limited to, her pattern of speech and intonation.

I’m no expert on American regional accents but I do recall that in the ’80s and ’90s a lot of U.S. movies featured teenage female characters called “Valley Girls,” who spoke with a weird vocal intonation where they would vary their pitch during a sentence to produce what has been called “up-speak.” This affectation has the effect of making even the most declaratory statement sound like a question. It’s associated forever in my mind with pampered teenagers, particularly girls.

Dr Ford seems, at 51, and of professorial rank, to have managed either to retain a Valley Girl accent from her youth or, worse, acquired one during her maturity. It’s a very girlish and unimposing manner of speaking, no? Read More »

HALLOWEEN, and the weeks of preparation for it, becomes more and more ghastly every year. These lovely skull planters are sold at the supermarket chain, Trader Joe’s. What kind of sick minds came up with these in the back offices of the retail giant? They’re even advertised with a lengthy piece in the corporation’s mailer:

Whether you’re looking for some seasonal, window skill decor or an actual, skull-sized statement piece, we’ve got you covered.

Supposedly a time of fun, Halloween surrounds children with the macabre, the monstrous, the ugly, the aggressive and the grotesque. They are further desensitized to the occult. Their innocence — the source of their greatest fun — is undermined.

Read More »

FROM The Jewish Telegraph Agency:

Casino mogul and Jewish megadonor Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, have given $55 million in the last few months to groups working to ensure Republican control of the House and Senate after the midterm elections.

The donations make them the “biggest spenders on federal elections in all of American politics,” The New York Time reported Saturday, citing publicly available campaign finance data.

The couple are very involved in how their money is being spent, meeting with the consultants and political strategists at Adelson’s office in Las Vegas, the newspaper reported. They ask pointed questions and demand campaign plans, preferably in writing, according to the report.

Adelson, whose estimated worth is $43.4 billion, has previously stated that his primary reason for backing the Republican Party is its support for Israel. The interests of Americans do not come first. If a Chinese billionaire influenced American elections and openly stated his purpose was to promote the interests of China, would Americans also look the other way?