Our Lady of Good Health Church, Indonesia

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Quinn Abbey, Ireland

The Church in Ireland is on rough days, but it will survive. Here is a picture of a ruined abbey, followed by an illustration of Cromwell’s reign of terror.

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Banned Books!

I have a collection of old books that I found in an old farmhouse a few decades ago. Here are a few of the very politically incorrect covers:

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news from Palestine

Letter from Palestine: life under occupation
Alex Snowdon

February 26, 2011 – The separation wall is the biggest recurring theme, together with the impact of settlements and military checkpoints. I’ve just heard that yesterday a woman, prevented from reaching hospital in time, gave birth at a checkpoint near where we are. This is a far from unique occurence. On Sunday in Abu Dis we talked with a teacher whose husband had a heart attack and was delayed reaching the hospital in east Jerusalem because he doesn’t have the ‘blue permit’ Palestinians need to access Jerusalem (thankfully he came through it). We have heard so many stories like these. We’ve talked with people who have themselves been directly affected by the Wall, which really is impossible to ignore here.   continua / continued    [75385] [ 27-feb-2011 07:18 ECT ]

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Cartoon of the day & What really happened.

Feb 27 08:25

PLUNDER-The Crime of Our Time-Part 1

By: 911insidejob
Tags:

• COVER-UP/DECEPTIONS/PROPAGANDA
• CURRENT EVENTS
• ECONOMY
• VIDEO

The four videos in this post give a detailed history of the theft of tens of trillions of dollars by Wall Street.

I feel compelled to make a few points.

The current fraud actually began before the sale of fraudulent mortgages. In 1994 the Bilderbergers and the Council on Foreign Relations had Bill Clinton and the Democrats and Republicans in the congress and the senate pass NAFTA and the WTO treaties.

These treaties closed 43,000 manufacturing plants and shipped 8.5 million jobs overseas. Another ten million plus jobs are being lost as the economy winds down.

This means that the bankers made fraudulently induced loans because they knew we were going to lose our jobs and be forced to take massive wage cuts.

»

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News from the labor/economics front

Matt Stoller: The Liquidation of Society versus the Global Labor Revival

By Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. His Twitter feed is http://www.twitter.com/matthewstoller.

Today, the city of Providence, Rhode Island sent out layoff notices to every single teacher in the city. Every single one of them. If you want to understand why this is happening, why wages in the US keep getting cut, this chart tells the story.

That’s the number of strikes since 1947. What you’ll notice is that people in America just don’t strike anymore. Why? Well, their jobs have been shipped off to factory countries, their unions have been broken, and their salaries until recently have been supplemented by credit. It’s part of a giant labor arbitrage game, that the Federal Reserve and elites in both parties are happy to play. Strike, and you’re fired. Don’t strike, and your pay is probably going to be cut. Don’t like it? Sorry, we can open a plant abroad. And we have institutions, like the IMF, to make sure that we get goods from those factory-countries, and get them cheap.
Read the Rest…

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Principles of Social Justice

There is a lot of talk today about “social justice” as if it were some sort of bad word. The propagnda against social justice is fueled by those who are looting the middle class. Here are principles of social justice as articulated by the late “radio priest” Fr. Charles Coughlin.

Father Charles Coughlin, Address on the National Union for Social Justice (November 11, 1934). In Charles E. Coughlin, A Series of Lectures on Social Justice (Royal Oak, Mich.: The Radio League of the Little Flower, 1935), 15-19.

[A Catholic priest from the suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan, Coughlin delivered popular radio sermons that offered broad proposals for economic reform.]

---

My friends, the outworn creed of capitalism is done for. The clarion call of communism has been sounded. I can support one as easily as the other. They are both rotten! But it is not necessary to suffer any longer the slings and arrows of modern capitalism any more than it is to surrender our rights to life, to liberty and to the cherished bonds of family to communism.

The high priests of capitalism bid us beware of the radical and call upon us to expel him from our midst. There will be no expulsion of radicals until the causes which breed radicals will first be destroyed!

The apostles of Lenin and Trotzsky bid us forsake all rights to private ownership and ask us to surrender our liberty for that mess of pottage labeled “prosperity,” while it summons us to worship at the altar where a dictator of flesh and blood is enthroned as our god and the citizens are branded as his slaves.

Away with both of them! But never into the discard with the liberties which we have already won and the economic liberty which we are about to win — or die in the attempt!

My friends, I have spent many hours during these past two weeks — hours, far into the night, reading thousands of letters which have come to my office from the young folks and the old folks of this nation. I believe that in them I possess the greatest human document written within our times.

I am not boasting when I say to you that I know the pulse of the people. I know it better than all your newspaper men. I know it better than do all your industrialists with your paid-for advice. I am not exaggerating when I tell you of their demand for social injustice which, like a tidal wave, is sweeping over this nation.

Nor am I happy to think that, through my broadcasts, I have placed myself today in a position to accept the challenge which these letters carry to me — a challenge for me to organize these men and women of all classes, not for the protection of property rights as does the American Liberty League; not for the protection of political spoils as do the henchmen of the Republican or Democratic parties. Away with them too!

But, happy or unhappy as I am in my position, I accept the challenge to organize for obtaining, for securing and for protecting the principles of social justice.

To organize for action, if you will! To organize for social united action which will be founded on God-given social truths which belong to Catholic and Protestant, to Jew and Gentile, to black and white, to rich and poor, to industrialist and to laborer.

I realize that I am more or less a voice crying in the wilderness. I realize that the doctrine which I preach is disliked and condemned by the princes of wealth. What care I for that! And, more than all else, I deeply appreciate how limited are my qualifications to launch this organization which shall be known as the NATIONAL UNION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE.

But the die is cast! The word has been spoken! And by it I am prepared either to stand or to fall; to fall, if needs be, and thus, to be remembered as an arrant upstart who succeeded in doing nothing more than stirring up the people.

How shall we organize To what principles of social justice shall we pledge ourselves? What action shall we take? These are practical questions which I ask myself as I recognize the fact that this NATIONAL UNION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE must be established in every county and city and town in these United States of America.

It is for the youth of the nation. It is for the brains of the nation. It is for the farmers of the nation. It is for everyone in the nation.

Establishing my principles upon this preamble, namely, that we are creatures of a beneficent God, made to love and to serve Him in this world and to enjoy Him forever in the next; that all this world’s wealth of field, of forest, of mine and of river has been bestowed upon us by a kind Father, therefore I believe that wealth, as we know it, originates from natural resources and from the labor which the children of God expend upon these resources. It is all ours except for the harsh, cruel and grasping ways of wicked men who first concentrated wealth into the hands of a few, then dominated states, and finally commenced to pit state against state in the frightful catastrophes of commercial warfare.

Following this preamble, these shall be the principles of social justice towards the realization of which we must strive:

1. I believe in liberty of conscience and liberty of education, not permitting the state to dictate either my worship to my God or my chosen avocation in life.
2. I believe that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just, living, annual wage which will enable him both to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency.
3. I believe in nationalizing those public resources which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.
4. I believe in private ownership of all other property.
5. I believe in upholding the right to private property but in controlling it for the public good.
6. I believe in the abolition of the privately owned Federal Reserve Banking system and in the establishment of a Government owned Central Bank.
7. I believe in rescuing from the hands of private owners the right to coin and regulate the value of money, which right must be restored to Congress where it belong.
8. I believe that one of the chief duties of this Government owned Central Bank is to maintain the cost of living on an even keel and arrange for the repayment of dollar debts with equal value dollars.
9. I believe in the cost of production plus a fair profit for the farmer.
10. I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government, which that laboring man supports, to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.
11. I believe in the recall of all non-productive bonds and therefore in the alleviation of taxation.
12. I believe in the abolition of tax-exempt bonds.
13. I believe in broadening the base of taxation according to the principles of ownership and the capacity to pay.
14. I believe in the simplification of government and the further lifting of crushing taxation from the slender revenues of the laboring class.
15. I believe that, in the event of a war for the defense of our nation and its liberties, there shall be a conscription of wealth as well as a conscription of men.
16. I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights; for the chief concern of government shall be for the poor because, as it is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.

These are my beliefs. These are the fundamentals of the organization which I present to you under the name of the NATIONAL UNION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. It is your privilege to reject or to accept my beliefs; to follow me or to repudiate me.

Hitherto you have been merely an audience. Today, in accepting the challenge of your letters, I call upon every one of you who is weary of drinking the bitter vinegar of sordid capitalism and upon everyone who is fearsome of being nailed to the cross of communism to join this Union which, if it is to succeed, must rise above the concept of an audience and become a living, vibrant, united, active organization, superior to politics and politicians in principle, and independent of them in power.

This work cannot be accomplished in one week or two weeks or in three months, perchance. But it must begin today, at this moment. It shall be a Union for the employed and the unemployed, for the old and the young, for the rich and the poor, independent of race, color or creed. It is my answer to the challenge received from the youth of the nation; my answer to those who have dared me to act!…

This is the new call to arms — not to become cannon fodder for the greedy system of an outworn capitalism nor factory fodder for the slave whip of communism.

This is the new call to arms for the establishment of social justice!

God wills it! Do you?

Front page from Social Justice:

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Principles of Social Justice

\

There is a lot of talk today about ‘social justice’ and most of it is misinformed. What we are witnessing today is a total roll-back of social justice “progress” since the turn of the 20th century and the rise of organized labor. Today, we even have advocates for repealing not just labor’s hard-won rights, but even advocates of child-labor. Slavery, in other words.

Here is something to consider, from the late “radio priest” Fr. Charles E. Coughlin.

Father Charles Coughlin, Address on the National Union for Social Justice (November 11, 1934). In Charles E. Coughlin, A Series of Lectures on Social Justice (Royal Oak, Mich.: The Radio League of the Little Flower, 1935), 15-19.

[A Catholic priest from the suburb of Royal Oak, Michigan, Coughlin delivered popular radio sermons that offered broad proposals for economic reform.]

---

My friends, the outworn creed of capitalism is done for. The clarion call of communism has been sounded. I can support one as easily as the other. They are both rotten! But it is not necessary to suffer any longer the slings and arrows of modern capitalism any more than it is to surrender our rights to life, to liberty and to the cherished bonds of family to communism.

The high priests of capitalism bid us beware of the radical and call upon us to expel him from our midst. There will be no expulsion of radicals until the causes which breed radicals will first be destroyed!

The apostles of Lenin and Trotzsky bid us forsake all rights to private ownership and ask us to surrender our liberty for that mess of pottage labeled “prosperity,” while it summons us to worship at the altar where a dictator of flesh and blood is enthroned as our god and the citizens are branded as his slaves.

Away with both of them! But never into the discard with the liberties which we have already won and the economic liberty which we are about to win — or die in the attempt!

My friends, I have spent many hours during these past two weeks — hours, far into the night, reading thousands of letters which have come to my office from the young folks and the old folks of this nation. I believe that in them I possess the greatest human document written within our times.

I am not boasting when I say to you that I know the pulse of the people. I know it better than all your newspaper men. I know it better than do all your industrialists with your paid-for advice. I am not exaggerating when I tell you of their demand for social injustice which, like a tidal wave, is sweeping over this nation.

Nor am I happy to think that, through my broadcasts, I have placed myself today in a position to accept the challenge which these letters carry to me — a challenge for me to organize these men and women of all classes, not for the protection of property rights as does the American Liberty League; not for the protection of political spoils as do the henchmen of the Republican or Democratic parties. Away with them too!

But, happy or unhappy as I am in my position, I accept the challenge to organize for obtaining, for securing and for protecting the principles of social justice.

To organize for action, if you will! To organize for social united action which will be founded on God-given social truths which belong to Catholic and Protestant, to Jew and Gentile, to black and white, to rich and poor, to industrialist and to laborer.

I realize that I am more or less a voice crying in the wilderness. I realize that the doctrine which I preach is disliked and condemned by the princes of wealth. What care I for that! And, more than all else, I deeply appreciate how limited are my qualifications to launch this organization which shall be known as the NATIONAL UNION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE.

But the die is cast! The word has been spoken! And by it I am prepared either to stand or to fall; to fall, if needs be, and thus, to be remembered as an arrant upstart who succeeded in doing nothing more than stirring up the people.

How shall we organize To what principles of social justice shall we pledge ourselves? What action shall we take? These are practical questions which I ask myself as I recognize the fact that this NATIONAL UNION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE must be established in every county and city and town in these United States of America.

It is for the youth of the nation. It is for the brains of the nation. It is for the farmers of the nation. It is for everyone in the nation.

Establishing my principles upon this preamble, namely, that we are creatures of a beneficent God, made to love and to serve Him in this world and to enjoy Him forever in the next; that all this world’s wealth of field, of forest, of mine and of river has been bestowed upon us by a kind Father, therefore I believe that wealth, as we know it, originates from natural resources and from the labor which the children of God expend upon these resources. It is all ours except for the harsh, cruel and grasping ways of wicked men who first concentrated wealth into the hands of a few, then dominated states, and finally commenced to pit state against state in the frightful catastrophes of commercial warfare.

Following this preamble, these shall be the principles of social justice towards the realization of which we must strive:

1. I believe in liberty of conscience and liberty of education, not permitting the state to dictate either my worship to my God or my chosen avocation in life.
2. I believe that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just, living, annual wage which will enable him both to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency.
3. I believe in nationalizing those public resources which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals.
4. I believe in private ownership of all other property.
5. I believe in upholding the right to private property but in controlling it for the public good.
6. I believe in the abolition of the privately owned Federal Reserve Banking system and in the establishment of a Government owned Central Bank.
7. I believe in rescuing from the hands of private owners the right to coin and regulate the value of money, which right must be restored to Congress where it belong.
8. I believe that one of the chief duties of this Government owned Central Bank is to maintain the cost of living on an even keel and arrange for the repayment of dollar debts with equal value dollars.
9. I believe in the cost of production plus a fair profit for the farmer.
10. I believe not only in the right of the laboring man to organize in unions but also in the duty of the Government, which that laboring man supports, to protect these organizations against the vested interests of wealth and of intellect.
11. I believe in the recall of all non-productive bonds and therefore in the alleviation of taxation.
12. I believe in the abolition of tax-exempt bonds.
13. I believe in broadening the base of taxation according to the principles of ownership and the capacity to pay.
14. I believe in the simplification of government and the further lifting of crushing taxation from the slender revenues of the laboring class.
15. I believe that, in the event of a war for the defense of our nation and its liberties, there shall be a conscription of wealth as well as a conscription of men.
16. I believe in preferring the sanctity of human rights to the sanctity of property rights; for the chief concern of government shall be for the poor because, as it is witnessed, the rich have ample means of their own to care for themselves.

These are my beliefs. These are the fundamentals of the organization which I present to you under the name of the NATIONAL UNION FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE. It is your privilege to reject or to accept my beliefs; to follow me or to repudiate me.

Hitherto you have been merely an audience. Today, in accepting the challenge of your letters, I call upon every one of you who is weary of drinking the bitter vinegar of sordid capitalism and upon everyone who is fearsome of being nailed to the cross of communism to join this Union which, if it is to succeed, must rise above the concept of an audience and become a living, vibrant, united, active organization, superior to politics and politicians in principle, and independent of them in power.

This work cannot be accomplished in one week or two weeks or in three months, perchance. But it must begin today, at this moment. It shall be a Union for the employed and the unemployed, for the old and the young, for the rich and the poor, independent of race, color or creed. It is my answer to the challenge received from the youth of the nation; my answer to those who have dared me to act!…

This is the new call to arms — not to become cannon fodder for the greedy system of an outworn capitalism nor factory fodder for the slave whip of communism.

This is the new call to arms for the establishment of social justice!

God wills it! Do you?

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Interior of St. Elijah the Prophet Church in Russia

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Requiem for the Hand-written letter

This article appeared in the Australian “The Record”: It made me laugh because once, a long time ago, I thought I would never use a typewriter. I particularly like the quote from Hilaire Belloc.

Tony Evans: Requiem for the handwritten letter

Wednesday, 09 February 2011

Of all the changes that the computer has wrought, one of the most dramatic, yet least remarked-upon, has been the death of the handwritten letter. Killed stone dead like Dickens’ Jacob Marley in Christmas Carol, ‘Dead as a door nail, there is no doubt about that’. The particular pleasure of discovering handwritten letters in the post has gone forever.  Only window envelopes, invariably containing official notices and unwelcome bills, are delivered by the postman, and most letterboxes now defend themselves by displaying notices banning junk mail. The once ubiquitous human activity of handwriting letters (and, later, typing letters) has been tossed into the waste paper basket of history. Not only has a whole way of life with its attendant disciplines disappeared almost overnight, but an accurate window into character, attitudes, beliefs and preoccupations of both the famous and the private person has been lost. A handwritten letter conveys far more than is expressed by the words on the page. The character of the writing, the speed with which it is written, the age of the hand, the colours of both ink and paper, and the manner of addressing the envelope, the mistakes and the corrections, and the unmistakable presence of the writer at those moments when the letter is being read, are all conveyed when the letter is opened in anticipation. Reading handwritten letters written in the past is like journeying in a time machine, enabling us to understand a little of the world as it was at the time the letter was written. In contrast, email is designed necessarily to be kept short and pithy, and employs a contrived shorthand devoid of character, with the result that it will not convey the heart and soul of the writer to future researchers who bother to delve into old computer files. So what will there be for future biographers to remember us by? Regrettably, nothing as revealing as a bundle of handwritten letters. I write this obsequy for the handwritten letter not to dismiss computers and email which I make use of freely, but as a life-long reader and a writer of biographies. In my own work, I rely largely on the handwritten letters of my subjects, and I can think of no biography I have read in recent years that has not been enriched by the inclusion of numerous personal letters. And again, how deprived will our literature be when collections of letters of the famous will no longer be available to be published.  Business emails and tweetings will hardly amount to literature worth reading – as for instance are the hundreds of letters of AW Pugin (Vol 3 just published), of Queen Victoria, of CS Lewis and dozens of others – and my current New Year reading, George Orwell, whose hundreds of fascinating letters reveal a deeply sincere, generous man with remarkable political insight. ‘Of course I intended [Animal Farm] primarily as a satire on the Russian Revolution.  But I did mean it to have a wider application inasmuch as that kind of revolution can only lead to a change of masters.’ And another example, this from the letters of Hilaire Belloc, an unguarded moment which could only come from a private letter and would prove a pot of gold for a biographer: ‘To me, the chief irritant is the stupidity of the hierarchy.  They throw away chances with both hands and they so often quite misunderstand problems they have to deal with. Their failure to wreck the Church is a proof of her divinity.’  Letters are the building blocks of good biographies. For the biographer, there is no thrill to equal the handling and studying of letters handwritten by the subject one is writing about. If you happen to be famous (or infamous enough) to warrant a biography 150 years hence, you had better start writing letters if you have not already done so. Yours will be a very dull biography indeed if your biographer relies on your emails and text messages. You may plead, as most people do, that modern life simply does not provide enough time for handwritten letters, invariably a labour-intensive exercise. It also requires the writer to think ahead of his writing because alterations and additions cannot be made as easily by hand as they can on a computer.  But lack of time is a feeble excuse unless it can be proved that there is less time available to us now than there was a hundred years ago, or that the clock moves faster now than it did in times past – a theory that gains much sympathy as one grows older.  How otherwise can we explain why great historical figures who packed their lives with activity, creativity and travel, found time each day to write not only letters in great numbers, but diaries as well?   The letters of William Gladstone, arguably Britain’s greatest and certainly longest-serving Prime Minister fill ten published volumes, quite apart from the 14 volumes of his diaries, also originally handwritten.  Churchill, as well as making time to direct World War II, wrote thousands of letters by hand.  Thomas Jefferson replied by hand to every letter, numbered in their thousands, which were addressed to him as President of the United States, irrespective of whether the writers were important or humble critics of his administration.  Dickens, who wrote all his novels by hand, amounting to millions of words, wrote handwritten letters which fill an equal number of volumes in their published form. Vincent Van Gogh managed to write some of the most profoundly moving letters of any artist; they now fill two published volumes. We know much more accurately the characters and activities of Beethoven and Mozart from their letters, in each instance filling three published volumes. Such examples from history are numberless and are not necessarily limited to the famous. This, in part, is why biographies of these and other historical characters are so often riveting to read and get close to revealing the real person. Lack of time is really not a sufficient explanation for the death of the handwritten letter. Suspicion also falls on the impoverishment of modern education and the imagined urgency about everything else that we do. We have no time because we think we have no time. But if we mourn the passing of the handwritten letter, it is yet possible to fight a rear-guard action as the body is delivered to the mortuary.  Resuscitation is possible by putting pen to paper at least occasionally.  Experience the pleasure of exchanging handwritten letters between friends and relatives. Ignore the taunt of friends that you are eccentric, or the ignoble accusation that you have nothing better to do with your time.  Not only is a handwritten letter a treasure, a gift, an act of giving part of oneself to another but a privilege to write, and a privilege to receive.  Furthermore, if you have an eye to your posthumous reputation, a bundle of your handwritten letters accompanying your Last Will and Testament might make the difference between having a dull, one-sided account of your life, or the inspiring, flattering story that you – naturally – believe you deserve.

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