The Sense of Touch, Jan Miense Molenaer (1637)

[Reposted entry that first appeared here on June 20, 2011]

IN THIS ARTICLE in Commentary on recent scandals involving male politicians, Kay Hymowitz writes:

Before the 18th century and outside of Western Europe, marriage was a social and economic as well as sexual arrangement; it had little to do with love and companionship, and no one much cared about whether women were fulfilled or not.

Is that so? Where would Shakespeare have come from – how would we have Juliet, Miranda, Katherina, Bianca, Desdemona, Portia, Ophelia, Gertrude, to name a few – if there had been no concept of love in marriage for women well before the 18th century?

How would Dido and Aeneas have come to be? How could Virgil have conceived such a pair? How about Penelope, Odysseus’s loving wife who refused to marry any number of suitors? These figures were imagined outside Western Europe before the birth of Christ.

I offer this other bit of proof that Ms. Hymowitz’s historical facts are a bit sketchy. Consider the above painting by the 17th century Dutch painter Jan Miense Molenaer. It is part of his series on the five senses and is aptly called “The Sense of Touch.” The great Dutch painters created an enormous body of work portraying marriage and domesticity in the 1600s. This is but one example. I think it suggests that women’s needs were at the very least taken into consideration before the 18th century – through the sense of touch if necessary.

The man receiving a beating above with a slipper may not be this woman’s autocratic husband. It is unclear. But do you think this woman, and the culture she came from, would have stood by while her romantic needs were neglected? I think not. Here is another Dutch painting, this one from 1622 by Frans Hals, titled “Couple in a Landscape.”

St. Anthony, Albrecht Durer; 1519

“ABBOT MOSES was accustomed to say that, as when a general besieges a city he endeavors to prevent any provision being brought to the besieged, in order that through hunger and want the enemy may be obliged to deliver up their city, so the man that desires to overcome his carnal passions, must starve them out by fasting and abstinence.”

— Richard Challoner on the Lives of the Fathers of the Eastern Deserts

FROM Heather MacDonald:

The celebrity college-admissions cheating scandal has two clear takeaways:  an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities. Thirty-three moguls and TV stars allegedly paid admissions fixer William Singer a total of $25 million from 2011 to 2018 to doctor their children’s high school resumes—sending students to private SAT and ACT testing sites through false disability claims, for example, where bought-off proctors would raise the students’ scores. Singer forged athletic records, complete with altered photos showing the student playing sports in which he or she had little experience or competence. Corrupt sports directors would then recommend the student for admission, all the while knowing that they had no intention of playing on the school’s team. Read More »

ART MUSEUMS are filled with too many frightening images.

TRUMP’S policy against “transgenders” in the military has gone into effect:

According to the Pentagon’s latest memo on the subject, the armed forces will no longer accept new recruits diagnosed with gender dysphoria or recruits who’ve had hormone treatment or reassignment surgery.

Already-serving members (who have been estimated to total anywhere from 1,320 to 6,630) may stay, but will be treated as members of their biological sex rather than their “gender identity,” and held to the dress and grooming standards of the former. Current medical treatment will continue for current members already diagnosed with gender dysphoria, but new transition procedures will not be offered. Read More »

Venus, a Landseer Newfoundland with a Rabbit, Sir Edwin Henry Landseer; 1819

In Praise of Self-Deprecation

The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with.
Scruples are alien to the black panther.
Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions.
The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations.

The self-critical jackal does not exist.
The locust, alligator, trichina, horsefly
live as they live and are glad of it.

The killer whale’s heart weighs one hundred kilos
but in other respects it is light.

There is nothing more animal-like
than a clear conscience
on the third planet of the Sun.

Wislawa Szymborska

DANIEL McADAMS from the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity interviews Phil Giraldi about the storm over Rep. Ilhan Omar:

Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar (MN) has stirred up both political parties with her comments on the Israel Lobby, has infuriated the Republicans with her aggressive line of questioning for Trump’s “regime change” expert Elliott Abrams, and has driven the Democrats mad with her criticisms of Barack Obama. Is she on the right track, or off the rails?

“IF THE Lord should give you the power to raise the dead, He would be giving you much less than He does when He bestows suffering. By miracles you would make yourself a debtor to Him, while by suffering He may become debtor to you. And even if sufferings had no other reward than being able to bear something for that God who loves you, is not this a great reward and sufficient remuneration? Whoever loves understands what I say.”

— St. John Chrysostom

FROM The Anti-New York Times:

Since the days of “Beatlemania,” the script-writers of the modern world have added the tactic of using the “real lives” of celebrity “role models” ™ as stealth cultural weapons of mass degeneration. The Beatles were introduced to America as four innocent, relatively clean-cut young lads in nice suits from Liverpool, England who sang mindless yet harmless songs. Within five years, their Jewish handlers had completely transformed them into drugged-up, counter cultural, pseudo-intellectual hippies. And millions of the formerly clean living American teens, who had originally taken the innocent bait, copied their musical gods — blindly following lead singer and admitted “One Worlder” John Lennon (“imagine there’s no countries”) into political and social radicalism.

A more recent example of this mass manipulation would be the shocking transformation of Miley Cyrus. From 2006-2011, Cyrus starred on the popular Disney Channel show “Hannah Montana.” The show seemed innocent and harmless enough (though the character lived a double life). With their parents’ blessing, millions of young girls grew up with Miley / Hannah.

In 2013, just two years after the show went off of the air, her handlers pulled the switch. Cute little innocent Miley Cyrus shocked the world with her pornographic “twerking” against the crotch of male singer Robin Thicke at the 2013 MTV Awards. And thus it came to be that a “dance” previously contained within the ranks of the skankiest of lowlife bar sluts soon became a “normal” part of the pop culture.

Then we have “The Kardashian” whores of “Reality TV” fame. Though there was no “bait & switch” tactic utilized here, the stupid show — followed religiously by millions of silly young women and girls — was used to heavily promote inter-racial marriage and trans-genderism (Bruce / Caitlyn Jenner was step dad to the Kardashian sluts.) Read More »

E. MICHAEL JONES is at his best here in this wide-ranging interview. Don’t miss his discussion of the woman who threw a chair at him in a restaurant, apparently because he was wearing a suit, and of why so many people are filled with rage. (I’m not sure who the interviewer is here. As with many amateur interviews on the Internet, it’s rough in spots, but she elicits good commentary.)

IMAGINE you have just been robbed and beaten. As the robber runs away on the street, he stops and starts to scream hysterically: “Help! Help! I’m in pain. I’m in pain. Oh! Oh! He hurt me! He hurt me!” The police show up. They automatically believe the thief is the victim. The hysterics distract them, and the robber has passed the loot to a friend.

That’s exactly what last week’s House Resolution 183 represents: hysterics by defenders of criminals. “Oh! Oh! They have hurt us! They have hurt us!” Criticizing Jews is supposedly tantamount to committing genocide. “Help! Help! I’m in pain!”

How is it possible that the most privileged group in America, the group that has brought us excessive mass immigration, indebtedness, multiculturalism, racial politics, unjust foreign wars, legal abortion, staggering financial crimes, ethnic networking that has crowded out others from top colleges and jobs, Holocaustianity, fraudulent evolutionism, psychiatric quackery, same-sex “marriage,” exhausted working mothers, pornography, the drug epidemic, sex for teens, transgenderism for tots, media monopolies that have near total control over the flow of information — and more, gets away with claiming to be the victim? 

It’s the chutzpah of the robber crying out. It’s so outrageous it stuns normal people into submission. The screaming, hysterical victim has moral status. He is so loud, so aggressive, so insistent, he prevents clear thought. Victims rule.

There’s another trick the robber plays. The police show up. The robber points to his victim and he says, “This man is claiming I robbed him. I can’t believe it! This man is sick! He’s irrational. He’s deeply irrational and he’s filled with hate. He belongs in a mental institution! Take him away!… Oh, I’m filled with pain! I’m in pain! The hate is killing me! Oh no! Help me! I’m going to die from hate!!”

And the real victim is taken away to be rehabilitated.

THE resolution condemning “white supremacism” passed by the House of Representative last week represents a familiar phenomenon, which Tobias Langdon at The Occidental Observer examines in contemporary Britain:

It’s like the set-up for a joke: “This young Jewish woman and this young Muslim woman walk into a classroom.” But the joke turns out to be a sick one: the Jewess and the Muslim are there to instill guilt in White children and grievance in non-White children. ….. The ideological contradictions are monumental, because Jews and Muslims are both highly clannish and xenophobic groups. The Jewish nation of Israel privileges the Jewish majority and ensures that minorities are kept firmly in their place. Muslim nations like Pakistan actively oppress non-Muslim minorities, often in ways that read like something out of Alice in Wonderland: “the new [blasphemy] laws in Pakistan were also noteworthy on other counts: there were no agreed standards of evidence; no requirement to prove intent; no penalties for false allegations, and no clear guide-lines for what actually constituted blasphemy. Most remarkably, accusers retained the right not to repeat offending statements in court in case it aggravated the blasphemy, leaving the accused vulnerable to a sentence without knowing what was said or done to have constituted blasphemy.” Read More »

Joseph Sobran

FROM an essay by the late great, persecuted columnist Joseph Sobran (1946-2010):

It was once considered “anti-Semitic” to impute “dual loyalty” to Jews — that is, to assert that most American Jews divide their loyalty between the United States and Israel. This is now passé. Today most politicians assume, as a matter of course, that Israel commands the primary loyalty of Jewish voters. Are they accused of “anti-Semitism” for doing so? Does this assumption cost them Jewish votes? Not at all! Dual loyalty nothing! Dual loyalty would be an improvement!

Once again, it’s a practical necessity to know what it would be professional suicide to say. No politician in his right mind would accuse Jews of giving their primary loyalty to Israel; but most politicians act as if this were the case. And they succeed.

You can read Jewish publications like Commentary for years, and you’ll read interminable discussions about what’s good for Israel, but you’ll never encounter the slightest suggestion that what’s good for Israel might not be good for America. The possibility simply never comes up. The only discernible duty of Jews, it seems, is to look out for Israel. They never have to choose between Israel and the United States. So much for the “canard” of dual loyalty.

The very word anti-Semite is reminiscent of the term anti-Soviet. It serves a similar function of facilitating imputations of ill-defined guilt. Read More »

PEOPLE diet to lose weight and to look better. But judging from the evidence, it often doesn’t work. Perhaps they are dieting from the wrong motives. In a spiritual fast, one learns to control the appetite — not for any worldly gain but for other-worldly gain.  The spiritual fast strengthens the will. The modern world needs fasting and abstinence more than ever:

But, alas! the generality of men consider these observances as duties incumbent indeed on persons in a retired or religious state, but wholly inapplicable to those, who take an active part on the theatre of the world. In opposition to this so fatal an error, I assert, that the practice of penance is, to persons in the world, above all others, of the most imperative obligation. The man of contemplation might possibly find, in the constant meditation of the truths of eternity, in the undisturbed application of his mind to prayer and celestial things, in the sacred and sublime occupations of his state, wherewith to combat his inordinate appetites. In the world, on the contrary, all things tend to excite and augment their violence. In the world, besides the evil propensities of nature, you have to struggle against the force of general example, against the seductions of pleasure, artfully decked out in its most attractive garb to enchant and captivate. There the passions are soothed and flattered; there virtue is without honour; there vicious indulgence, in almost all its shapes, is excused, in many is even applauded. In the world, then, the practice of self-denial is of the first necessity; there, if you are not mortified, your ruin is inevitable.

Read more on “The Necessity of Mortification.”

ANTI-TRUST laws have not prevented the sometimes intense consolidation of retail businesses to the detriment of the consumer. A good example is eyeglasses:

This week, the Los Angeles Times spoke with two former executives of LensCrafters: Charles Dahan and E. Dean Butler, who founded LensCrafters in 1983. Both admitted that today, glasses are marked up nearly 1,000 percent.

“You can get amazingly good frames, with a Warby Parker level of quality, for $4 to $8,” said Butler. “For $15, you can get designer-quality frames, like what you’d get from Prada.”

Butler added that shoppers could get “absolutely first-quality lenses for $1.25 apiece.” When hearing that some glasses sell for $800 in the US, he laughed. “I know. It’s ridiculous. It’s a complete rip-off.”

Butler and Dahan confirmed what shoppers have already suspected: There’s price gouging in the optical industry. The main culprit? The eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, which essentially controls the industry. [Source]

Still Life, Pieter Claesz; 1625-26

       THERE are but few social questions which have not been ably and spiritedly treated of by the public writers of the age, who have devoted their talents to the study of what is called Political Economy; and it has often been a matter of surprise to us, that they should have overlooked a subject of such deep interest as this,–the results produced on society by the abolition of Lent, that is to say, of an institution, which, more than any other, keeps up in the public mind a keen sentiment of moral right and wrong, inasmuch as it imposes on a nation an annual expiation for sin. No shrewd penetration is needed to see the difference between two nations, one of which observes, each year, a forty days’ penance in reparation of the violations committed against the Law of God, and another, whose very principles reject all such solemn reparation. And looking at the subject from another point of view,–is it not to be feared that the excessive use of animal food tends to weaken, rather than to strengthen, the constitution? We are convinced of it,–the time will come, when a greater proportion of vegetable, and less of animal, diet, will be considered as an essential means for maintaining the strength of the human frame.

— Dom Prosper Gueranger, The Liturgical Year, 1870

THE MEDIAREPORT.COM reports on the criminal conviction on sex abuse charges last week of Australia’s “Cardinal” George Pell:

The entire “Catholic Church abuse story” has long ago ceased about being about “justice for victims” and “bishop accountability.” The actions of law enforcement, the media, tort lawyers, and so-called “victims groups” are now nothing less than a full-on assault against the Church because of its teachings on sexual ethics. The issue of sex abuse committed decades ago is just a pretext for this attack, and the absurd criminal conviction of Cardinal George Pell on ludicrous abuse charges is simply the latest proof of this.

See Pell’s police interview above.

Clerics truly guilty of the sexual abuse of minors deserve the death penalty. There is cause for grave doubt, however, of the charges leveled against Pell.

[Note: While this website does not accept the legitimacy of cardinals who embrace Vatican II, it recognizes that sex abuse media stories and prosecutions in many cases amount to defamation of the true Catholic Church. The many charges against Pell and others, whether true or false, also amount to a chastisement against the modernist, phony religion which has supplanted the Catholic faith in churches across the land.]