Book & Movie Reviews:
Now that the history question has been answered without so much as a spoiler alert, and now that Graham Linehan’s particular judgement has been pre-announced, let me urge you to read the book anyway. Tough Crowd is that rare thing, a memoir that will bear repeated readings. Yes, Linehan is just a really good writer, and yes, the book is a captivating blend of social and cultural history that doubles as a series of genuinely expert tutorials: how to write a joke; the golden rules of making a sit-com; casting for sit-coms; how to write a musical; how to keep a writing partnership together…
Whoa, hold on there Jacob! This has nothing to do with resistance? Middle Eastern Muslim militants are really European anti-Semites. Hamas is just another manifestation of Nazism? I honestly don’t know how enflamed with Nazi ideology Hamas really is, but if even Hamas can’t be accorded some justification for dissatisfaction with Israel, then who can be absolved from the charge of being a Nazi sympathizer…
Both the German Lutheran Jew Marx and the Russian Jew Alinsky fit the mold described in Civilta Cattolica by Fr. Giuseppe Oreglia di Santo Stefano who, like Christ, explained that those who reject Him become the children of Satan: many Jews possessed by “Satan, by demons or by spirits, that is, moved by a satanic hatred of the Christian name” have “always persecuted the Christians” and not the other way around.
Catcher in the Rye is a dreadfully banal and blasphemous book that forces the reader inside the head of a teenage loser as he descends lower into popular culture oblivion. We might even say that the book has shaped or even defined pop culture and popularity itself. Holden Caulfield was a popular person at his prep school in every modern way – i.e., he smoked, he drank, he cursed, he used Christ’s name in vain fluently, he mingled comfortably with alpha males and attractive girls, he had wealthy, indifferent parents and a suave older brother…
Then sensing that an even more radical form of damage control was necessary, Gould asked for unanimous support from parliament to expunge the embarrassing incident permanently from the official record, prompting me to tweet “Nazi Gate goes down the memory hole. Has MP Karina (“As a descendent of Jewish Holocaust survivors”) Gould been reading George Orwell? Does she think pretending that the standing ovation for the Nazi never happened will blot it from everyone’s memory?”
Most of the poems with gloomy references to God or Christ are found in Borges later books, while most of his poems with positive allusions are found in his early work. This seems to indicate a trajectory and does not bode well for Borges because, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and E.M. Jones have pointed out time and again, what is in the soul of an artist will be bared, explicitly or implicitly, in his work.
Although it is easy to understand the mistake of ignoring divine attributes that appear negative to modern man, it is not so easy to understand the mistake of downplaying the divine beauty. Maybe it is because beauty is a transcendental that surpasses human reason unaided by supernatural grace. In other words, it is hard to imagine. Fortunately, E. Michael Jones has contributed greatly to the consideration of the divine beauty and how crucial it is to Christian life in his book The Dangers of Beauty: The Conflict Between Mimesis and Concupiscence in the Fine Arts.
Good luck to you, Leo Grande might easily be subtitled, “A Card-carrying Feminist’s Tribute to Wilhelm Reich.” As readers of Culture Wars will know only too well, Reich believed that patriarchal religion caused mankind’s hitherto healthy attitude to sex to degenerate into that combination of fear and frustration by which it is caricatured to this very day. All that sublimated sexual energy got transformed, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into the great evils of Christian culture – respect for parental authority, chastity, marriage, love of family, love of country – more commonly known as fascism.
And to be honest, this sort of approach, which is contained in the book, is very much in the insulting style of the testimony of Vrba himself. He is portrayed as the great hero putting the counsel for the defense, Douglas Christie, in his place. But no-one reading the transcript could ever come to such a conclusion. Vrba is obstructive and disrespectful from the very beginning of his testimony. True to his reputation, he regularly insulted Christie and the defendant. In fact, Christie at one point politely struck back by suggesting that Vrba must have used trick memory techniques to keep his lies straight. Vrba flashed back, “Should I bring you six million bodies here that are the proof?”
When Librium (chlordiazepoxide) came to market, Arthur Sackler saw to it that the public image of Librium was that it was a new, safe, nonaddictive replacement for the older and admittedly more dangerous barbiturates. Early concerns about the dangers of Librium and Valium (diazepam) were waived away; the problem was with the individuals using them, the drugs themselves were perfectly safe.
In the mind of the clerics who used Vatican II concepts like synodality to make a separate peace with the modern world, the Volkswartbund typified the Church’s failed attempt to use condemnation to uphold the moral and social order. Moral reform based on authority was supposed to take a back seat to the “medicine of mercy” in reforming the culture even if no one knew how this applied to Jews promoting pornography. For the Catholic Church, which was worried about losing more of the faithful, Calmes’s Cologne-based and often-mocked legion of decency had become an unwanted burden…
Unfortunately, Cole doesn’t understand masturbation either. Before she wrote her book on sex and the internet, she should have consulted Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint or better still, the locus classicus of masturbation theory, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, by Wilhelm Reich. Like Philip Roth, Reich was a Jew who wanted to weaponize masturbation into a form of control. The Mass Psychology of Fascism appeared in print in 1933, the same year in which Philip Roth was born. At that time, Reich was a Freudian and a Communist living in Vienna and at war with the Catholic population of Austria, the truncated rump of the once powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire. Reich noticed that the same crowd whose eyes glazed over when he began lecturing about the fourth thesis of the Third International perked up whenever he talked about sex
The Kyrie Irving incident seemed at first glance to be the classic example of hysterical Jewish over-reaction leading to the exact opposite of what the Jews intended to bring about. In response to a basketball player recommending a recent movie—From Hebrews to Negroes—which was available on Amazon, the Jewish CHEKA, otherwise known as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), demanded Irving’s head on a platter, leading the NBA to suspend him for five games and to issue a six-point plan which he had to fulfill before Adam Silver, the Jew who headed the NBA, would allow him to return to the league…
As is the case with all of Michael’s books, the reader gets a well-rounded education in many fields of knowledge. In order to understand art, you must also understand some philosophy, which is why the book starts with Plato and Aristotle. But don’t worry. Michael gives what you need to know about these two Greek philosophies in order to see how they affect our understanding of art. It is no coincidence that, as almost everything else divides with Plato on one side and Aristotle on the other, from the get-go the understanding of art begins with the dichotomy dictated by these two disparate philosophies….
Innerhalb weniger Stunden nach dem Angriff auf die Nord-Stream-Pipelines am 22. September entstand die allgemeine Meinung, dass die Amerikaner die Täter waren, obwohl die Mainstream-Medien sich darin einig waren Russland zu beschuldigen. Nur die Amerikaner hatten ein Motiv und die Mittel dazu. Die Beweise beruhten auf Indizien, allerdings auf unwiderlegbaren. Innerhalb weniger Stunden nach dem Angriff machte das Video der Pressekonferenz von Präsident Biden mit Bundeskanzler Olaf Scholz vom Februar 2022 im Internet die Runde. Als Antwort auf eine Frage eines Reporters im Februar sagte Biden unmissverständlich, dass Amerika die Nord-Stream-Pipelines ausschalten würde, falls Russland in die Ukraine einmarschiert. Das Video von Victoria Nuland, in dem sie dasselbe sagte, begann ebenfalls innerhalb weniger Stunden nach dem Angriff zu zirkulieren.
Within hours of the September 22 attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, a consensus emerged that the Americans did it, in spite of the fact that the mainstream media were united in blaming Russia. Only the Americans had the motive and the means. The evidence was circumstantial but irrefutable. Within hours of the attack, the video of President Biden’s February 2022 press conference with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz was making the rounds on the Internet. In response to a question from a reporter in February, Biden said in no uncertain terms that if Russia invaded the Ukraine, America would take out the Nord Stream pipelines. The video of Victoria Nuland saying the same thing also started circulating within hours of the attack.
Buckle up and prepare for a wild ride. After a lifelong contemplation of the subject, popular author Paul Thigpen has decided to make a case for aliens living on other worlds, and perhaps visiting ours. Catholics will be interested in what he has to say because Paul attempts to use scriptural, magisterial, and traditional sources to support his pro-alien view.
In an article in the Unz Review in July, retired CIA agent Philip Giraldi described an encounter he had at what he called “an antiwar conference.”
Five years ago, I wrote an article entitled “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s wars.” It turned out to be the most popular piece that I have ever written and I was rewarded for it by immediately being fired by the so-called American Conservative magazine, where I had been a regular and highly popular contributor for fourteen years. I opened the article with a brief description of an encounter with a supporter whom I had met shortly before at an antiwar conference. The elderly gentleman asked “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference, and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”…
Why would a Soviet-led expedition of eight women climbers prefer to die, in the worst storm that hit Lenin Peak in twenty five years, rather than accept help from fellow male climbers?
Not considered steep or technical, but nonetheless very high at 7,134 meters (23,406 feet), situated within the Pamir Mountain range at the Tajikistan-Kyrgyzstan border. Lenin Peak is subject to harsh, unstable weather conditions. It is known by climbers for its strong winds, frosty temperatures, with sections of moderately steep ice. At such a high altitude the weather can turn very suddenly with an additional risk from avalanches for those ascending or descending. The peak is the highest mountain in the Trans-Alai range. This combination of changeable weather and high altitudes has resulted in the deaths of many of its climbers…
Having dealt with what is undoubtedly the biggest weapon in the mainstream Holocaust propaganda campaign, namely Auschwitz (once referred to in this context by David Irving as “the great battleship Auschwitz,” with the major task for revisionists being, “Sink the Auschwitz!”), Germar Rudolf moves on to look at other camps, beginning with the so-called “Operation Reinhardt” camps, the terminology used by mainstream writers for the alleged systematic extermination of Jews in three “pure extermination camps” in eastern Poland, namely Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibór. Rudolf asserts that this claim of mass murder is wrong…
In one of my numerous podcasts, I announced that I was a guinea pig in a social experiment which had been kept a secret from me for my entire life. The name of that experiment was social engineering. It began shortly after the Allied victory in World War II by driving my family out of our ethnic neighborhood in Philadelphia, and it eventually drove my generation insane with a combination of sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. The one thing that remained constant during this period of time was the silence of the social engineers and the ignorance of the guinea pigs who had been the unwitting recipients of their ministrations. The author who writes under the pseudonym of Margaret Clare Devlin has done the baby boomer generation a favor by breaking that silence in a way that is no less shocking than it would have been if a lab rat had stood up to the scientist who was experimenting on it and said, “Cut it out” or, better, “I know what you’re doing, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” After a lifetime spent as part of an unnamed experiment which wrecked her life and the lives of everyone in her family, one of the guinea pigs finally figured out what was going on and decided to tell her story in all of its gruesome detail. Boomers’ Families springs from the Catholic tradition which Augustine founded when he wrote his Confessions and Thomas Merton resurrected for Americans when he wrote The Seven Storey Mountain. It’s required reading for every baby boomer whose life got ruined by the enemies no one ever warned him against in an undeclared culture war whose main strength was that the victims didn’t know that war was being waged against them.
On Friday, August 12, a 24-year-old New Jersey resident by the name of Hadi Matar stormed the stage in western New York where the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie was scheduled to speak and stabbed him 15 times before he was subdued by a security guard and members of the audience.1 The assault was immediately labeled “an assault on freedom of thought and speech”2 and Rushdie was praised as “an inspirational defender of persecuted writers and journalists across the world.”
Any lingering regard I had for David Baddiel disappeared back in 2014. That was the year his first children’s book was published. Writing books for children is the last – but one – refuge of the washed-up “alternative” comedian. I have a particular loathing for children’s books written by alternative comedians, washed-up or otherwise. With titles like The Parent Agency, The Boy Who Could Do What He Liked and Head Kid, it was painfully obvious that in rehashing his “alternative” comedy schtick for schoolchildren, this pin-up boy of the 1990’s “comedy is the new rock n’ roll” generation thought it would be a good idea to impose on the children of England the jaded revolutionary politics with which the grown-ups of England are becoming increasingly fed up. With this deeply held prejudice I decided to read Jews Don’t Count, at which point I discovered that David Baddiel had reinvented himself again – this time as cultural commissar, the last refuge of the washed-up alternative comedian….
In an article which appeared recently in the National Catholic Register, Father Raymond J. de Souza announced that the Church had a “German problem.”1 The indisputable evidence for this problem could be found in the results of the German synod, which announced that the main problem facing the Church lay in lack of tolerance for sexual deviance. Whether that was construed as a celibate clergy, prohibitions against the divorced and remarried receiving communion, or disapproval of homosexuality, the German “Synodal Weg,” made it clear that it was the Church which had to change, not the Germans who had acquired a lot of bad habits over the past half century. The flagrant use of Church structures to undermine Church teaching provoked outrage among a group of “more than 70 bishops—led by four cardinals from three continents”—who “issued an open ‘fraternal letter’ to the bishops of Germany stating that ‘the potential for schism … will inevitably result’ if they do not repent of their ‘Synodal Path.’”
In an exquisite example of Providence’s comedic wit, Pope Francis announced the self-referentially named Synod on Synodality two years ago during the annus horribilis. Last year “the synodal process” began slouching its way toward Rome. This October, the world’s dioceses will begin the process of tabulating and synthesizing the results of their listening sessions. In October of next year, the world’s bishops will gather to be midwives at the birth of what has already been hailed as the newest “new Pentecost” (yes, really).3 What is the Synod on Synodality? What implications does it have for an already divided and ailing Church?
Desert Island Discs is 80 years old this year. The BBC Radio 4 favorite owes a great deal of its enduring popularity to the simple perfection of its interview form. To make desert island existence more endurable, each guest is permitted eight pieces of music, one book and one luxury. The same two books are given to every guest — the Bible and the Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Each guest gets to choose a third. When you, dear reader, get your D.I.D. 45 minutes of fame, may I suggest that you choose E. Michael Jones’ latest book. If you insist, as the ideal complement to the Bible and the Bard, to go for one of Jones’ other tomes — any one of which will double very nicely as a desert island coffee table – then I suggest this simple solution: take, let’s say Logos Rising as your book, and take The Dangers of Beauty as your luxury.
Want to read something about Ukraine? A great lost Catholic thriller from the early 20th century, The Supreme Crime, is set there. Elite newspapers publish annual recommended summer reading lists (“Hottest Summer Reads,” “Ultimate Beach Reads,” etc.), which are usually books on current events, or, alternatively, are scorching page-turners that are easy to read while on vacation? This book is both.
The Ayatollah Sayyid Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi was an important figure in recent Iranian history. Widely recognized as the Ayatollah Khomeini’s heir apparent, Shahroudi was an Iranian-Iraqi dual citizen whose job was to unify Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon under a Shi’a alliance based on anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism whose ultimate goal was the elimination of Israel in collaboration with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Shahroudi was also involved in Iran’s Ostpolitik—or perhaps Nordpolitik would be a better term—which began on January 3, 1989 when the Supreme Leader, as one of his last acts, sent a delegation which included Abdollha Javadi-Amoli, Mohammed Javad Larijani, and Marzieh Hadidchi to Moscow bearing a letter in which Khomeini warned Mikhail Gorbachev of the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union. Marxism, in Khomeini’s opinion, could not deal with the world situation because its materialistic ideology could not resolve a spiritual crisis brought on by lack of belief in spirituality, which he considered “the prime affliction of human society in the East and the West alike.”