I watch this, and it all comes right back.  Trembling, quaking rage.  Good.  It’s a consolation to know that I’m still human – at least a little.  Please, God, let me never become like the blunted, impotent wretches of western civilization, self-righteously indifferent to evil, desensitized, unable to sort reality from the flickershow.

Now that the Obama regime’s plans are coming to full, open fruition, and we can expect the Caliphate to begin launching major attacks in the West at any time, there is a lesson we should take from 911 dispatch tapes like that of Kevin Cosgrove.  If you find yourself in a situation wherein death is near, by all means, call 911 or anything that you know will be recorded – even if it is your own voicemail.  And then use that time and the fact that you are being recorded to talk to the people you love, and to pray.  Tell your family and friends how much you love them.  Tell your enemies that you forgive them.  Tell God that you are sorry for all of your sins not only because you don’t want to go to hell, BUT BECAUSE YOU LOVE HIM AND YOU KNOW THAT YOUR SINS OFFENDED HIM, WHO IS PERFECT GOOD AND INFINITE LOVE.

“The Grace of a Happy Death” that we pray for in the Fourth Glorious Mystery of the Rosary (Our Lady’s Assumption into Heaven), for some, might just be the consolation of dying knowing that we died with the Love of God and of Neighbor on our lips.  If it is recorded, so much the better.

And, it seems to me, that we should indeed “live like we are dying” in this sense.  Tell your loved ones that you love them.  Attempt to make an act of perfect contrition every day.  Acknowledge every day that it could all end tomorrow.  When I went on my pilgrimage to Rome back in ARSH 2012, on the last evening I sat for quite a while in the neighborhood church after Mass and tried to memorize and drink in as much as I could – the altarpiece, the architecture, the pews, the smell, the way the sound carried.  I did the same thing when I got back to my hotel – I went and sat on the terrace which overlooked St. Peter’s Basilica and just stared at it.   And while I was terribly sad to leave, I was consoled by the fact that I had “said my goodbye”.  I do this action of taking a last look and saying a silent goodbye – just in case – to places and people now quite a lot.  And while it may sound macabre to the decadent post-Christian, post-American ear, it is no such thing.  I reckon this might be a little bit of what is meant by the term “detachment”.  As you can see, in this sense, to be detached is the opposite of indifference or aloofness.  I can’t imagine how it could be bad to internally take leave of those we love as if it is for the last time, and then to greet them internally as if we never expected to see them again.  And then when and if the “real deal” happens, we will already know what to say and how to say it.

Rest in peace, Kevin Cosgrove and all the others.

1.  Scrumtrulescent Balsamic Steak Marinade

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup soy sauce (the good stuff, with enough sodium to kill a small llama – yum)
scant 1/4 cup worcesteresterestershester sauce
one big, fat heaping tablespoon brown sugar

Whisk together until the brown sugar is dissolved.  Pour over steaks in a big Ziploc bag and let marinate for at least four hours, up to 24.  Just be sure that the steaks are allowed to come up to room temperature before going on the grill.  Putting cold steaks on the grill is a sin against nature.  Don’t do that.  Don’t ever do that.

I whipped this up ad hoc not long ago in order to augment some round steaks that a friend in Riverville had somewhat inadvertantly bought for the grill.  Round steaks are from the butt, and are thus tougher and less marbled than ribeyes and strips, and thus need “help”.  When these came off the grill, grown men cried.  True story.  This would also be fantabulous with flank steak or skirt steak.

2.  Sorry again for the shameful lack of posts.  I dunno.  It’s just slightly deflating to see all of this monumental, evil stuff going on, and the top headline on Drudge is “Joan Rivers Plays Heaven”.  Yeah.  Because the completely expected death of an 81 year old woman who was addicted to self-mutilation, who had herself anesthetized in a doctor’s office, and was a fifth-rate “entertainer” at best, is clearly THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD.  You betcha.  Let’s canonize JOAN RIVERS.  Next you’re going to tell me we should canonize Paul VI Montini.  Oh, wait….

3.  And then I go to sites like Ace of Spades and they are still, STILL trying to parse Obama and the Obama regime from the false premise that Obama and the regime are NOT the malignant, psychopathic (incapable of feeling shame or guilt), sworn enemy belligerents of the American people and milieu that they are.  What can Obama be THINKING??  How could he possibly be so INEPT?  Well, what Obama is thinking is, “I’d sure like to smoke some crack and then be fellated by one of my male concubines.  It’s been six hours since the last time I smoked crack and was fellated.  I gots to get me some crack and fellatio.  Somebody bring me some crack.  And then **** my ****. ”

Meanwhile, Obama’s handlers are thinking, “It’s all going according to plan.”  Because it is.  It’s all intentional, conceived long ago with malice aforethought.

4.    In my Economics YouTube presentation, I discussed the secession movements in Scotland (from the UK), Catalonia (from Spain), and Venice (from Italy).  Scotland is now polling at 51% with momentum in favor of secession, with the referendum on September 18th.  Here is my take on this.  Scotland is a grotesque welfare piglet, suckling off of the x-rays being emitted by the financial black hole of doom that is London.  So, if Scotland secedes, Scotland will fail and collapse, because that is what welfare states do.  BUT, in the interstitial euphoric period, the Scottish secession, if it happens, will provide massive encouragement and momentum for the Catalonian and Venetian movements.  Scotland could be the spark that sets off a chain of sovereign delinkages.  I advocate the return of Italy into its natural three or four separate states – with separate, competing currencies!  Only this will allow the south of Italy to ever get on its feet – oh, and also a heckuva lot of mafiosi will have to be publicly executed, too.  The Italian Republic is a purely synthetic fiction.  But what is very troubling is the Catalonian independence movement in Spain.  Catalonia is the stronghold of the resurgent Andalusian branch of the New Caliphate.  An independent Catalonia would effectively be the first foothold of the Caliphate on the European continent.

5.  So, um, turns out that Cardinal Timmy Dolan up there in Nueva Jork really and truly is an unmitigated jackass, as I have been screeching and caterwauling for YEARS, huh?  I was going to write a huge screed, but then I saw Mike Voris’ Vortex on Dolan from earlier today, and he says exactly what I was going to say.  The only thing I will add is from the little preamble in my Missal for yesterday’s Mass, the 13th Sunday after Pentecost:  “We ask for the virtue of charity, which renders us lovers of the Divine Law, and practicers of it.”  As Mike reiterates so well, Dolan gives every appearance of despising the Divine Law, and thus suffering from a complete dearth of charity.  The man would sell his grandmother to the Nazis in exchange for a tepid round of applause.  He seems to not care one iota, that is to say is completely indifferent to Our Lord and about the souls of other human beings, and cares only for his own earthly, worldly acclaim, to the point that he will now embrace and cheer men who shove their erect penises up into the feces-laden rectal vaults of other men, and then use said rectal vaults as the point of friction for masturbation; a crime against God, nature, one’s self and one’s neighbor that is so vile that it causes even the demons to withdraw in disgust, cries out to heaven for God’s vengeance, and makes Our Lord, Incarnate, in His own words, “nauseous”.  Remember, indifference, not hatred, is the opposite of charity.

Oh, and all of you neo-conservative Novus Ordo “everything’s awesome here in the new springtime of the Church” Catholics for whom Dolan has been a hero, SHAME ON YOU.  Shame on you for not instantly seeing through this OBVIOUS charlatan. The man could not be any more insincere, smarmy, and sleazy in his comportment.  I’ve seen bottles of Mexican champagne that projected more sincerity. The evidence has been right in front of you for years, not the least of which is his raging hatred of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the Mass of the Ages, as offered from the Last Supper up until the Asteroid (™) impacted in ARSH 1969.  Y’all need to come to grips with the fact that hatred of the Old Mass is a surefire indicator that something is terribly, terribly wrong with a given prelate, priest or layman.  Preach on, Mike:

6.  As an addendum to my “We Should Be Ashamed” post, here is a fantastic piece that was published over at Rorate Caeli called “Post-Christian and Secular: The Loss of Pudor”.  A friend pointed it out to me by saying, “Oh, it sounds just like you, except… GOOD, and with Scripture, and quotes from the Aeneid.”  Wisenheimerus.

7.  Yes, I fully agree with Laurence Kotlikoff’s warning that the SIPC (Securities Investor Protection Corporation – like the FDIC but for securities accounts) is an insurance scam and with his warning to clear out of all brokerage accounts.  Obviously.  We knew this already from the MFGlobal theft and subsequent rape, which SIPC was fully complicit in.  It is what I’ve been screaming since MFGlobal in November of ARSH 2011.  Kotlikoff rightly warns of SIPC not only NOT insuring the theft of customer funds, but of the SIPC declaring any and all failed custodial firms or funds as Ponzis, and thus enabling SIPC to CLAW BACK any funds that may have been withdrawn prior to the collapse.  Yup.  Not only will they not insure customers, they will sue you if you prudently manage to get out of the system showing any sort of a profit on the account.

Here is an interview I did with Warren Pollock back in ARSH 2012 in which we touch on this idea, and how legal precedent has been set via a non-reported but desperately important legal decision from the 7th Circuit involving the collapse of a Chicago Ponzi scheme called Sentinel.  The Sentinel ruling essentially said that ANY person or entity that deposits money into a custodial account gives up ALL PROPERTY RIGHTS to that money, which then becomes the property of the Ponzi which it then uses (“rehypothecates”) as collateral to margin its own mega-levered proprietary trading schemes.  And when it collapses, the bankruptcy courts, exchanges, regulators, FEDGOV and alleged “insurers” will all collude to funnel every dime of collateral belonging rightfully to you, the great unwashed, to the mega-bank counterparties, including clawing back money that you pulled out of the system before the collapse.  Just like they did with MFGlobal.  Thankfully there were no clawbacks in the MFGlobal rape, but it was being discussed – seriously.

Many, many people deride and disdain Cassandras like me, Warren Pollock and Karl Denninger because we have been warning about this for years and the system hasn’t gone “nuclear meltdown” yet.  Now do you see why we have been warning for years, not concerned with trying to pick “the top of the bubble”?  Do you think it was better for people to pack up and leave Germany YEARS before the war started, or was the best move to wait until the day, or the hour before the bombs dropped on their specific house?  The sooner you get out and the more temporal distance you put between yourself and “ground zero”, the better off you will be.  People who have been out of the system for two or three years will be much safer vis-a-vis clawback than people who are just now getting out.  And really, what it all comes down to is if you see and understand what is inevitably coming, you are morally obliged to  move and make ready immediately, and not cravenly speculate and tempt God by hanging around trying to play a bubble.  There’s no free lunch, people.  You mess with the bull and you get the horns.  Every time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLe03nzEbE

Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, Giotto, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, ARSH 1305

This is the explanatory preamble from my missal for today’s feast, the Nativity (birth) of the Blessed Virgin Mary (nine months to the day after the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, naturally).  I thought it quite beautiful and timely, for those of us feeling the weight of the darkness of these days:

At the time of Mary’s birth the whole world was plunged in darkness.  The heathen nations were steeped in vice and pride.  The Jews, beloved of God, had strayed from Him.  Everywhere there was sin and gloom, no bright spot on the face of the earth.  But when Mary was born a light arose amidst the darkness:  the dawn of the glorious day that was to usher in the Redeemer.

Remember, The Blessed Virgin was born with the egg that would be fertilized by the Holy Ghost and thus incarnate Our Lord already in her ovary, fully-formed with half of Our Lord’s DNA, just waiting.  Who knows what foundations and groundworks He has laid on the earth and in our lives, already extant or partially so, just waiting to be completed and realized in the fullness of time according to His will?

The S&P, the Dow, US Treasury Bonds, CURRENCIES (WHAT THE $%^&!), Petroleum, Metals, Agricultural Products, everything.  The Chicago Mercantile Exchange and CFTC have openly confirmed that CENTRAL BANKS are in the markets by posting the REDUCED FEE STRUCTURE for CENTRAL BANKS that trade the futures and options markets.  That link goes to the CFTC.  The Commodity. Futures. Trading. Commission.  As in the Federal Government of the Iniquitous Gutter Kleptarchy, your tax dollars at work, ‘Merica.  The CME has a special incentive program for Central Banks to trade.  Isn’t that nice of Terry Duffy and the boys to give the Central Banks a break on fees?  Aw.

Here is the write up at ZeroHedge, sourced from, yet again, Nanex.

There is no acid-trip rabbit hole deep enough to match the depths of insanity that have now been plumbed.

Are we fuzzy on what a “Central Bank” is?  Well, let’s go the definition just so everyone is crystal, crystal clear on this:

Central Bank: an institution that manages a state’s currency, money supply, and interest rates. Central banks also usually oversee the commercial banking system of their respective countries. In contrast to a commercial bank, a central bank possesses a monopoly on increasing the amount of money in the nation, and usually also prints the national currency, which usually serves as the nation’s legal tender.

Um, yeah.

Sooooo do you think that it is a tiny bit problematic for entities that PRINT MONEY to trade equity, currency and commodity markets?

Do you think it is problematic that an entity that can print theoretically infinite amounts of money IN ORDER TO MEET ITS MARGIN CALLS can trade massively leveraged markets?

Do you think it is problematic that entities that can stand theoretically infinite losses, who can print their way out of ANY position with effectively zero need to ever close out a position, and thus utterly destroy any connection whatsoever of the markets to REALITY, do you think that might just present a tiny bit of a market integrity issue?  Just a smidge??

I want someone to explain to me how honest cash-derivative basis convergence can possibly, possibly happen if one side of the market has an infinite supply of funds, and thus for whom the entire notion of “losses” becomes a complete irrelevancy.  Please.  I’m all ears.

I want to know how arbitrage can occur in that environment.

And perhaps THE ENTIRE POINT:

I WANT TO KNOW HOW ANY DERIVATIVE MARKET CAN POSSIBLY REMAIN SUBJECT TO ITS UNDERLYING CASH PRODUCT/COMMODITY IF THERE IS NO WAY TO FORCE PRICE CONVERGENCE BECAUSE ONE SIDE HAS AN INFINITE SUPPLY OF MONEY.

I WANT TO KNOW HOW THE CASH MARKETS ARE NOT THEN PERVERSELY DRIVEN AND THEIR PRICES “SET” BY THEIR DERIVATIVE MARKETS,  EVEN UNTO COMPLETE IRRATIONALITY AND UTTER DELINKAGE FROM REALITY, WHEN ENTITIES WHO CAN PRINT THEIR OWN MONEY ARE TRADING DERIVATIVES.

Food.  Energy.  Currencies.  Precious metals.  Interest rates.  Equities (stocks).

Now we know why these flash crashes happen.  Now we know how it is that super-massive orders and trades have wrought havoc on the markets – running stops and clearing everyone and everything on the other side out in quantities that surpassed the sizes of any possible private market participant.  Central banks.  You people are trying to trade against someone with an infinite supply of money.

As I have been screeching for years, it’s all fake.  See Part 7 of my Economics Presentation on YouTube, beginning at the 8:30 mark.  There are no real people left in the markets.  It’s all a facade, and behind there is nothing but Central Banks and computer algorithms, propping up whatever prices the oligarchs want propped-up (like the EQUITIES MARKETS), and suppressing what they want suppressed (like the METALS). Oh, and there are yet a dwindling handful of imbecilic stooges and the used-car salesmen brokers who lack the integrity to tell their clients the truth, both hoping to milk and pimp just a few more bucks out of the orgiastic abomination.

And it is hinted at the end of the ZeroHedge piece, but I will state it explicitly just to get it out there:  The United States Federal Reserve Bank is trading the markets through a super-massive hedge fund/ high frequency churn house called Citadel.  Now we know why Citadel is levered-up to the jaw-dropping extent that it is:  Why fear leverage when your number one client meets its margin calls by PRINTING US DOLLARS?

When I folded my firm in November of ARSH 2011, it certainly smacked of defeat.  I admit that.  Just because I did it with moral certainty doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a decided air of “the bad guys won and I lost” about it, and doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a tough pill to swallow at the time.  But now, good grief, I am so overjoyed to have my engagement with these markets and that industry in the rear-view mirror and totally out of sight I can hardly describe it.  All of us who have been calumniated as “tinfoil behatted loons” with regards to the corruption, manipulation and non-viability of the markets now stand confirmed and vindicated.  How is anything other than a total financial market strike justifiable now??

When I concluded my “shutting down letter” with the words of David, it was with the grinding teeth and clenched fists of a blind faith.  Now I restate it with nothing but confirmed joy:

“This is the Lord’s doing; and it is wonderful in our eyes.”  

Yes, it was, and yes, it is.

Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

St. Rose of Lima, Claudio Coello (ARSH 1642-1693)

We read that her confessor offered himself to go to the missions, but he feared because of the dangers it would entail. After consulting the saint, he heard these words: “Go Father, and do not fear. Leave all to labor for the conversion of the infidel, and know that the greatest service that man can offer to God is to convert souls, for this is a work proper of the Apostolate. What greater happiness could there be than to baptize, be it only a little Indian child who would enter Heaven through the gates of Baptism?”

This came across the transom a couple of days ago, and SHTFplan.com has covered it here, but this REALLY needs to be pushed and publicized.  You’ve GOT to get your wealth out of banks – most especially the big ones.  This is truly sinister, and straight from the mouth of the Vice Chairsatan of the Fed, Stanley Fischer, and a speech given on August 11th at “The Great Recession–Moving Ahead,” a Conference Sponsored by the Swedish Ministry of Finance, in Stockholm, Sweden, as posted on the Federal Reserve Bank’s official website.

Additional steps have been taken in some countries. For example, in the United States, capital ratios and liquidity buffers at the largest banks are up considerably, and their reliance on short-term wholesale funding has declined considerably. Work on the use of the resolution mechanisms set out in the Dodd-Frank Act, based on the principle of a single point of entry–though less advanced than the work on capital and liquidity ratios–holds the promise of making it possible to resolve banks in difficulty at no direct cost to the taxpayer. As part of this approach, the United States is preparing a proposal to require systemically important banks to issue bail-inable long-term debt that will enable insolvent banks to recapitalize themselves in resolution without calling on government funding–this cushion is known as a “gone concern” buffer.

“Bailing-in” is what happened in Cyprus last year.  Remember that?  Probably not, because it was more than 36 hours ago.  Customers’ bank deposits were swept in order to “recapitalize” the Cypriot banks, hence the phrase above “recapitalize themselves”.  Customers were issued, in exchange for their cash which had been stone-cold stolen from them, long-term debt in the banks, bonds which were worth less than the e-paper they were written on.  That is what the “long-term debt” referenced above is.

Isn’t it interesting how these people think that stealing OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY held in SACROSANCT CUSTODIAL ACCOUNTS constitutes banks “recapitalizing THEMSELVES”?  I know it is still hard for some people to comprehend how totally the Rule of Law has been reduced to a veneer mere atoms in thickness in western civilization, but when you deposit money in a bank, these people view that money as THEIR property, because stupid peasants like you exist simply to subsidize them.

But hey, at least they won’t have to call on “government assistance” after seizing all of their customer seg funds (exactly like MFGlobal) and mollifying you, the great unwashed, with their junk bonds.

The term “gone concern” is defined as “a defunct firm or one in the process of being wound up. Debts of such firms become due immediately in full, their market value is determined on the basis of auction or liquidation value of their tangible assets, and their goodwill counts for nothing.”

So yes, the Vice Chairsatan of the Fed is talking about “systemically important”, read BIG, banks as “gone concerns”, because that is exactly what they are, and further calling on these banks to establish a plan RIGHT NOW for seizing their customer deposits to “recapitalize”, or “bail themselves in” while cravenly maintaining the political line of “not taking government money”.

As I said in the spring or ARSH 2013 when it happened, Cyprus was a test run for the big show in the U.S. and western Europe, as was MFGlobal 18 months before.  The people there rolled over and took it, and to be perfectly frank, I believe that right now there is no more flaccid, impotent, submissive culture on this planet than in the former United States of America.  You might say, well, what about Ferguson?  What does Ferguson have to do with it?  Pookie, Tyrell and Shemeequa DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY IN CHASE, BANK OF AMERICA or CITI.  They live on gubmint EBT cards.  Jose and Hose B, coming out of Old Mexico, are FAR to savvy to ever deal in anything except cash money and Tide detergent, homes. No, those trillions in deposits, they belong to the most enfeebled and non-threatening creatures ever seen in all of human history:  the post-Christian post-American caucasian.

Not only will no one do anything AFTER it happens, even when warned and shown explicit, clear language openly declaring what is intended to be done, the post-American caucasian is so thoroughly whipped that he can’t even summon the courage to act to protect himself BEFORE IT HAPPENS – so weak that as he sees Mike Tyson bounding out of the opposite corner towards him he can’t even raise his arms to protect himself.  All he can do roll his eyes contemptuously at the “loon” in his corner begging him to fight, while his urine puddles beneath him.

For the love of God, at least raise your arms.

Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

Saint Augustine of Hippo, Philippe de Champaigne, ARSH 1645-1650

“You never go away from us, yet we have difficulty in returning to You. Come, Lord, stir us up and call us back. Kindle and seize us. Be our fire and our sweetness. Let us love. Let us run.” 
― Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

(Sorry for the dearth of posts over the last week.  All of these dark events have me, admittedly, feeling a bit sluggish.  However, I continue to be encouraged and edified by the steady stream of goodwill, prayers, and truly kind sentiments that flow into my email box every single day.  It really is shameful that I don’t do more, but … well, no buts.  There is no “but” to it.  It is shameful that I don’t do more, full stop.  And, as always, but not said nearly enough, deepest, humblest thanks to all of those who give me little pieces of their lives, the fruits of their labors, those proxy-units for the time and skill and toil that they have accumulated, called “dollars”.  I use $20 per hour as my baseline, and thus consider all inflows as “hours of people’s lives” they they have freely seen fit to give TO ME.  When put in these terrible (in the sense of “extremely serious”) terms, all I can know is that my gratitude is wickedly, shamefully insufficient.  And now, back to the clown show….)

We should be ashamed.

But we’re not.  And that is the problem, because without shame there is no hope, and believe me, I fully appreciate the enormity of the phrase “no hope”.

Shame is a gift from God to fallen man, and nothing less.  Shame is a grace that God desperately wants to shower us with in light of our concupiscent nature and sinfulness.  Do you remember that SHAME, or “sorrow for sin”, is the fruit, yes FRUIT, of the First Sorrowful Mystery of the Rosary, Christ’s Agony in the Garden?  We are to beg God every day in our prayers to increase the shame we feel for our own sins, and also for the sins of the world.  We are to meditate on what our sins and the sins of others do to God, trying as best we can to grasp in even the most tenuous way how even the smallest sin is an offense of INFINITE proportion to God, and in doing so to be ever-more filled with God’s grace so that we sin less and less.

Now let’s think about the contemporary world, both secular and within the Church among the modernist-communist-sodomite infiltrators.  Shame is viewed not as the gift from God that it is, but as a scandal to be eliminated, a character fault to be purged, and a “hate crime” when recommended to others.

“Um, you should be ashamed of yourself.”
“Shut up!  Who are you to judge?”

Psychopathy and Sociopathy, which are the absence or near-absence of shame or guilt in the human person, a massively blunted or completely absent conscience, terms which I will continue to utilize, promote and scream from the rooftops without apology, are encouraged today under the banner of “self-esteem”, “freedom”, and even more obviously, “pride”.

Here’s the problem.  Christ’s Mercy, which is INFINITE, can only apply if the person is SORRY for their sins.  We have to be sorry.  If we aren’t sorry, if we do not believe that our sins are sins, or if we believe that our sins DON’T MATTER because we have a “legal right” to be forgiven and we gone through the motions and mindlessly bleated out the right words with no actual contrition or shame behind them, or if we simply don’t care, then Christ, who can work with infinitesimally little, at that point has NOTHING to work with.  When we give Him NOTHING to work with, we go to hell.  And while we can never know if any specific person is in hell because we can never know if at the very last instant they gave Our Lord “something to work with”, what we can know for an absolute certainty is that people have, do and will go to hell.  Lots of them.  Our Lord and His Saints have made this crystal, crystal clear.  In fact, when taking Our Lord’s and the Saints’ warnings together as a whole, the prudent man can operate under no other assumption than that it is far, far easier to achieve hell than the Beatific Vision.

I will now address this question from three vantages: the atheistic, the Catholic, and the Protestant.  First the atheistic tack, but it applies to everyone.  Let’s talk about the Natural Law.  Every single human being is given by God an innate understanding of the difference between good and evil, including the psychopaths.  Everyone knows, deep down, that walking up to a stranger on the street and gouging his eyeballs out is EVIL.  Everyone knows, deep down, that stealing someone else’s property is EVIL.  Now stay with me, modern western man:  Everyone knows deep down that tearing a baby limb from limb is EVIL.  We have to be massively conditioned to think otherwise.  Don’t believe me?  Have you ever known a family wherein the Mommy was pregnant and there was an older sibling – even only two or three years old, old enough to understand that there was “a baby in Mommy’s tummy” and the following proposition:

Do you remember that I told you that there is a new baby in Mommy’s tummy?
Yes.
I am going to go kill the baby.  I am going to rip its head off, pull it out of my tummy and throw it in the trashcan.  Okay?

If the child genuinely comprehends those words: baby, kill, rip, throw away, trashcan; then the child WILL object.  Even if the child does not comprehend death, it will comprehend “throw away in the trashcan”.  If there is no Natural Law, if there is no baseline infused morality, how could a three year old possibly know that killing a baby is wrong and terrible?

Let’s look at another example, modern western man.  Adultery.  I know that I have many atheist readers that I have attracted over the years mainly from my financial/economics posts.  I am willing to bet that the majority of my atheist readers would happily concede that a married man should not cheat on his wife.  I would further guess that the majority of such men have never cheated on their wives.  I would further guess that those who have cheated on their wives (working the averages, here) felt some sort of shame or guilt at some point afterwards – and not mere regret because it cost them half of their estate and pre-tax income for life, but actual shame – even if they got away with it and the wife never found out.  What is that about?  That is the Natural Law.  The Natural Law is why most people don’t steal.  The Natural Law is why, up until recently, most people have not cheated or gamed the system to survive, but instead worked and lived lives of general integrity, including many pagans.  The Natural Law is why we all still to this day look down upon those cultures that are largely built on grift, theft and thuggery, specifically the “gypsy con-artist and pickpocket” culture, the rap/hip-hop culture, and the musloid culture.  It requires massive conditioning and inculcation to blunt and eventually eliminate altogether shame and the pangs of conscience that spring innately from the Natural Law.  The easiest way to do it is to start as early in childhood as possible.

It is simply dishonest to say that the atheist is not capable of and does not feel sorrow for sin.  Most do.  The atheist’s problem is that he does not acknowledge WHO his sorrow is directed towards.  He thinks that it is towards himself, or other people alone, or towards “the universe”.  It is neither.  His sorrow, even if he swears up and down to the contrary, is first towards God, because God, being Perfect Good Itself is the Standard by which good and evil are defined, and it is God who gave the atheist his conscience and his knowledge of the Natural Law.  It is for this reason that I make the following statement:  I’d rather find myself stuck in a foxhole with an atheist with a conscience than a baptized, confirmed and Mass-going Catholic who feels no shame – in other words, is a sociopath or psychopath.

Which brings us to the Catholic perspective.  I want to address this from what I feel is probably the most relevant and valid critique of Catholics (not Catholicism, but Catholic people) by Protestants today.  Protestants say that Catholics lack a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and that they sin shamelessly, and then go “babble a few prayers in the confessional” and smugly call it all good.

Yeah.  I’ve got to agree with that.  WHOLE. HEARTEDLY.  In fact, it is precisely this that kept me out of the Church and hesitating for years.  I personify this exact critique in the Kennedy Family.  Now, Teddy may have repented and felt genuine contrition for the all of the rapes and sexual assaults he committed, the satanic political agenda he executed, and the murder of Mary Jo Kopechne, among all of his other sins.  We can’t know.  But we do have a fairly good indication that that psychopathic servant of satan was NOT sorry for most of his life.  He JOKED OPENLY about Chappaquiddick for the rest of his life.  Now if I had to lay money, I would guess that he probably at some point went to confession and made some mention of murdering Mary Jo Kopechne, but all appearances would indicate that if he did confess murdering her, that he did it NOT because he was sorry (because nobody laughed harder or knew more Chappaquiddick jokes than ol’ Teddy the Swimmer – utterly, terrifyingly shameless), but because he felt that the sacrament of confession would provide iron-clad LEGAL protection, and I don’t mean “legal” in the earthly sense.  I mean “legal” vis-a-vis God.  “If I go through these physical motions then God is LEGALLY OBLIGED to forgive me.”  Um, no.  God cannot forgive you and offer His Infinite Mercy if you are not SORRY.

This is why there is such a supernatural gift among saintly priests throughout history as the ability to “read souls” in the confessional.  The most famous and most recent of these is St. Padre Pio.  People FLOCKED to him for confession because you couldn’t lie to him, or confess sins that you weren’t sorry for.  If you dared kneel in his confessional without genuine contrition for your sins he would throw you out on your ear.  And the same if you lied to him.  He knew.  By the grace of the Holy Spirit, he knew.

And this is where the accusation of Catholics not having a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” is actually accurate – in the way that a stopped clock is right twice per day.  Yes, for many Catholics today it is all a legal system to be gamed.  Sin, make a purely legalistic confession (if that), have zero genuine sorrow and zero intention to stop the sinful behavior, lather, rinse, repeat.  In excess of 90% of western Catholics today of breeding age contracept.  Of those, a relatively small percentage do confess this sin regularly, but are not sorry and have zero intention at any point of ceasing to contracept.  Is such a confession valid?  No it is not.  Surprisingly, it is not the absence of the feeling of sorrow, but the absence of the decision or will to avoid the sin in the future that is the invalidator.  Now this is nuanced, so stick with me here because it is EXTREMELY important.  It is not that the sinner might fall into the same sin again, that is not the standard, because as we all know, we all keep falling.  The invalidator is confessing a sin that you have NO INTENTION OF EVEN ATTEMPTING TO STOP.  So, the Catholics who confess contracepting just to, for lack of a better term, “cover their asses” in a legalistic sense, with no intention of stopping, invalidate their confession.  As does the (rare) sodomite today who confesses sodomy (I’ll spare using the previous term here because the pun would be too much for even me to bear) in a purely legalistic mindset, but who have zero intention of living a chaste life.  And even if one’s conscience has been malformed by bad clergy, we must never forget that the Natural Law never, ever goes away.  That money doesn’t belong to you, so you can’t have it.  Don’t murder chicks you pick up in bars, or babies.  Don’t have sex with other people’s spouses.  And about your thingamajig?  Yeah.  IT DOESN’T GO THERE.

So… what is missing here?  What is God’s gift to us that corrects this problem?  You guessed it!  SHAME.  But why?  Why should we feel shame at breaking a set of rules?  Because the “set of rules” is a PERSON.  More precisely, the set of rules is a derivative of a Person.  And that Person is God, who is perfect Good, perfect Justice and infinite Love, and thus is infinitely offended by our sins, and despite this, so loved the world that He Incarnated, suffered (infinitely) and died, because nothing short of God sacrificing Himself, and suffering infinitely in the process, could ever come even remotely close to redeeming humanity.  There is NOTHING that any human being could do that could ever even begin to make up for even the slightest, tiniest sin.

Western Catholics, especially since The Asteroid (™) hit in the mid-1960s, have been steadily drained of an appreciation of the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary, and have been indoctrinated with Protestant-atheist ideas that A.) their sins aren’t really sins at all and thus they should NOT feel shame or guilt for them and B.) even if they do sin, God’s mercy is a given, a blanket that covers everything (ahem), so don’t even sweat it.  Shame is a an antiquated, peasant concept far beneath the modern, everlasting man….

The modern world and the scourges upon and infiltrators of the Church constantly do the following:

CONFLATE MERCY WITH PERMISSIVENESS
(Michael Sam is an unrepentant sodomite?  GOOD FOR HIM! -Cardinal Timothy Dolan)

and, they

CONFLATE CHARITY WITH INDIFFERENCE.
(Stop obsessing!  Who am I to judge?  – Pope Francis)  

If we truly have a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” as the Protestants are ironically fond of saying, we think about how our sins offend Him PERSONALLY, and how our sins are what scourged Him, mocked Him and crucified Him during the infinite agony of His Passion.  The Divine Law, both Natural and codified within the Church, which is a derivative of Him because He is perfect Good, perfect Love and perfect Justice, is what tells us the difference between right and wrong.  In other words, HERE CONCUPISCENT DUMMIES.  I’VE WRITTEN IT ALL DOWN FOR YOU, BECAUSE I LOVE YOU.  AND ALSO THE SERPENT IS SUBTLE, AND Y’ALL ARE KINDA DUMB.

We know sodomy is wrong and utterly shameful because it is repellant to the depths of our being, and it requires a massive effort to become desensitized to its repugnant foulness and the shame that it naturally, by the grace of God, elicits.  (Cough, media and education system, cough.) And, He wrote it down for us too!  We know that adultery, masturbation, theft, lying and a host of other common sins are wicked and shameful both via the Natural Law and because… HE WROTE THEM DOWN FOR US, but to continue doing doing these things because, “Meh, I’ll just go to confession every so often and I’ll be covered” with NO SHAME, no sorrow for having offended God, and most critically, no intention whatsoever of stopping, but only of continuing to legalistically “game the system” – in other words, scourging, spitting upon and crucifying The One Who Loves You Infinitely so that you can continue to have WHAT YOU WANT, that is what is referred to as the Unforgivable Sin: presuming upon God’s mercy.  Think about it.  You know what you are doing is wrong. You know Christ and that He died for your sins.  And knowing these things you callously and with full, conscious premeditation decide to SIN ANYWAY because Christ’s Passion and Death on Calvary, His Agony and Blood, LEGALLY OBLIGES HIM TO FORGIVE YOU.

That’s just about as bad as it gets.  It is a truly psychopathic lifestyle.  Shamelessness and utter  indifference to Him.

Which leads us to the Protestant portion and conclusion.  I had an acquaintance when I was in college – a seeker who jumped from denomination to denomination with no disqualifications save one: The Roman Catholic Church.  Years later he had an infant grandchild to whom he started writing letters – a very cool idea indeed.  However, I had to ask him to stop including me in the email list of folks he sent these letters to after the letter in which he told his grandson to NOT worry at all about sin and just to live his life however he wanted because … you probably know where this is going … the Blood of Jesus covered all of his sins and thus his sins were IRRELEVANT so long as he “accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior”.  In other words, this well-intentioned but desperately, woefully, terrifyingly heretical man advised his grandson to live his life without shame for his sins, and thus committing the Unforgivable Sin, presuming upon God’s Mercy AS PROOF OF HIS FAITH.  This is stone-cold Luther, who said “Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly.”  This is why I call Luther a psychopath, and why that incident still makes me shudder to this day.  I hope it always does.

I pray every day that God give me the grace to feel ever more shame, guilt and sorrow for my sins, and also for the sins of others as well.  I want to take up others’ slack, if that is even possible given the burden of my own sins.  I also fear greatly the sins that I commit and have committed that I don’t realize or currently comprehend are sins.  Remember, we are not the arbiters of truth or the determiners of what does or does not constitute sin.  We do not decide FOR OURSELVES what is and is not sin, no matter how many clergy tell you this truly pernicious lie. There are millions if not billions of people on this planet who truly do not believe that their sins are sins.  This does not change the objective, external reality of their sins, nor does it in any way reduce the offense caused to God, or the suffering that He endured because of them.  Remember those heartbreaking words of Our Sweet Lord, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”  I want – DESPERATELY – to know all of my sins so that I can be ashamed and confess them, and also so that I don’t do them again, because every one of my sins tortured, mocked and crucified Christ, and I am NOT OKAY WITH THAT.

The world is going to hell IN A HANDBASKET because shame is considered a psychological defect to be overcome, and a hate crime when recommended to others.

Well, that’s 3000 words.  There is more to say on this topic, but I think that is enough for today.  I hope this helps you.

I am happy to announce that this month’s Holy and August Sacrifice of the Mass offered for the intentions and benefit of all of my benefactors and supporters will this coming Saturday, August 23rd.  Yay!  Mark your calendars!

Here is a lovely and edifying letter which came over the transom today.  I’m getting my Zed on with the red bracketed comments.

Dear Ann,

I wanted to say thank you for you and your blog. Just this past Easter, I joined the Roman Catholic Church, and my life has been transformed.

Sometime last year I left the Presbyterian Church (USA) because it felt more like a Democratic party meeting than a worship service. [It wasn’t a worship service.  Worship involves the offering of a sacrifice, by definition.  Protestantism is protesting the Holy and August Sacrifice of the Mass, qua sacrifice, and thus Our Lord’s real physical substantial presence in the Eucharist.]  I was sort of in the wilderness for a while doing some “shopping” for another church to attend. The problem is that I had no idea what a church believed or didn’t believe. [Oh, neither do they.] There is absolutely no transparency in the land of Protestants. “Dogma” could change as fast as as a pastor changed.

I eventually started attending Mass due to a lot of seeds being planted here and there. I won’t bore you with the details (if I haven’t already), but your post where you mentioned the book “Four Witnesses” was the tipping point. After reading through that book, how can anyone deny that the early Church fathers viewed the Eucharist as the true Body and Blood of Our Blessed Lord?! [It requires utter, complete dishonesty born from massive pride.]  After that, I was all-in. [As one is when dealt the divine royal straight flush.]

Thank you again. I would imagine you have converted a significant number of people into Catholics.  [No, God does that, and it almost certainly has nothing to do with me, but probably also has something to do with the prayers and sufferings of some good and holy Nunny-bunnies somewhere.]

 

They pray. God answers. I rant. God sighs. You convert. The Nunny-bunnies get the heavenly assist, as is meet and just.

 Thanks for telling the truth. [It is obligatory, no thanks required.] Thanks for your courage. [Meh. The Christian martyrs being raped and beheaded by ISIS, those people are courageous.  The jury’s still out on me.] Keep writing. [Okay.] Keep sounding the alarms.  We need you and this world needs more properly catechized Catholics. [You don’t need me.  You need Our Lord and His Holy Church.] I just punched in a donation. I will pray for you and I hope you will pray for me and my family. [Every day.]

Best,

J

Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.

PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum. Adveniat regnum tuum. Fiat voluntas tua, sicut in caelo et in terra. Panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie, et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris. Et ne nos inducas in tentationem, sed libera nos a malo. Amen.

St. John Eudes will always be a favorite because he has one of the most informative and explicatory quotes about what is happening to us, the Church and the world.  He simply and directly answers the question, “My God, why is this happening?”:

“The most evident mark of God’s anger, and the most terrible castigation He can inflict upon the world, is manifest when He permits His people to fall into the hands of a clergy who are more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds. They abandon the things of God to devote themselves to the things of the world and, in their saintly calling of holiness, they spend their time in profane and worldly pursuits. When God permits such things, it is a very positive proof that He is thoroughly angry with His people and is visiting His most dreadful wrath upon them.”
–Saint John Eudes

Here is another quote from St. John Eudes on the effect of our sins on Our Lord’s Sacred Heart.  Read it well.

The first cause of those most painful Wounds in the Sacred Heart of Our Redeemer is our sins. We read in the life of Saint Catherine of Genoa that one day God let her see the horror of one tiny venial sin. She assures us that, although this vision lasted but a moment, she saw nevertheless an object so frightening that the blood froze in her veins and she swooned away in an agony that would have killed her if God had not preserved her to relate to others what she had seen. Wherefore she declared that if she were in the very depths of a sea of flaming fire and it were in her power to be set free, on condition that she should once more behold such a spectacle, she would choose to remain rather than to escape. If the sight of the smallest venial sin brought this saint to such a pass, what must we think of the state to which Our Saviour was reduced by seeing all the sins of the universe? He had them continually before His Eyes, and His vision being infinitely more powerful than that of Saint Catherine, He could behold infinitely more horror.

He saw the immeasurable insult and dishonour it caused His Father; He saw the damnation of a countless number of souls resulting from those sins. As He had infinite love for His Father and His creatures, the sight of all those sins rent His Heart with countless Wounds, such that if we were able to count all the sins of men, which are more numerous than the drops of water in the sea, we would then be able to count the Wounds of the loving Heart of Jesus.

The second cause of His Wounds is the infinite love of His Sacred Heart for all of His children, and His constant vision of all the afflictions and sufferings that are to happen to them, especially all the torments that His holy martyrs are to suffer. When a mother watches her beloved child suffering, she feels the pain more keenly than the child. Our Saviour’s love for us is so tremendous that if the love of all parents were centred in a single heart, it would not represent even a spark of the love for us that burns in His Heart. Our pains and sorrows, ever present to His vision and seen most clearly and distinctly, were so many Wounds bleeding in His paternal Heart. These Wounds were so painful and deep that they would have caused His death a thousand times over, even immediately after His birth, if He had not miraculously preserved Himself, because during His whole earthly life His Sacred Heart was continually pierced by many mortal Wounds of love.

Therefore we have the greatest obligation to honour the gracious Heart that sustained so many Wounds of love for us. With what affection should we embrace, and endure all our afflictions, out of love for Jesus, our Saviour, since He first bore them for love of us! Should they not be most sweet to us, since they have already passed through His most gentle and loving Heart? What a horror we should have of our sins that have caused so many Wounds and such intense grief to the divine Heart of our Redeemer!

Let us learn from the foregoing example that it is not our Redeemer’s fault if we are lost. There are hearts so hard that, even if Jesus Himself were to come down from heaven to preach to them and they were to see Him covered with Wounds and bathed in His Blood, they would still not be converted. O my God, let us not be one of them, but give us the grace to open our ears to the voice of all the sacred Wounds of Your Body and Your Heart, which are so many mouths through which You call us unceasingly: ‘Redite, prævaricatores, ad cor — Return, transgressors, to the heart’, which means to My Heart that is all yours, since I have given it entirely to you. Return to that most loving Heart of your Father, which is full of love and mercy for you, which will receive you home, heaping upon you blessings.