Francis W. Porretto
Mount Sinai, NY USA
Author's posts
Sep 24 2022
When Tyranny Is No Longer In Dispute
…it can still surprise onlookers with its boldness: Mark Houck is the founder and president of The King’s Men, which promotes healing for victims of pornography addiction and promotes Christian virtues among men in the United States and Europe. According to his wife Ryan-Marie, who spoke with LifeSiteNews, he also drives two …
Sep 23 2022
Crankings
It’s important to take a break now and then from obsessive news-reading. Keeping up with the news does provide fodder for a lot of opinion-editorials, but it can also turn one into a Curmudgeon Emeritus. I’m here to tell you. *** Sometimes an act of charity – even simple cordiality toward a lonely …
Sep 23 2022
The Timeless Wisdom of Winnie The Pooh
As you’ve probably already concluded from my habit of stippling my pieces here with quotations, I’m always on the hunt for pithy sayings, clever epigrams, and thought-provoking observations. Brevity isn’t just the soul of wit; it also maximizes your chance of actually getting an idea through the ever-more-substantial blockades around others’ brains. Lately, I …
Sep 22 2022
An Interesting Assertion
And from a really interesting source: “Putting people’s lives at risk,” eh? Which people? The illegal aliens, or the residents of the areas to which Abbott and DeSantis are sending them? Who is in danger from whom? Would you care to expand along those lines, Miss Black Lesbian Immigrant White House Press Secretary? …
Sep 21 2022
Day Off…From The Internet
I have a long list of chores to discharge, and I was planning to compile an “assorted” column anyway, so here are the links. If you’re a Gentle Reader of long standing, you hardly need me to comment on these things. They more or less comment on themselves: Bombshell Revelations from the “Special Master” …
Sep 20 2022
My Horrifying Opinions
Time was, I studied the natural sciences: physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, even a little meteorology. It’s not a program I recommend to anyone else. You see, it made me socially unacceptable. Stop looking so shocked! The study of the sciences equips the student with facts, and you should know that the possession of …
Sep 19 2022
Yet Another Transition
…this one from “You can’t make this stuff up” to “OMG, does he have any idea what he’s saying? Biden: People disapprove of me because they are psychologically unable to be happy pic.twitter.com/syg1nNPtJw — RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 19, 2022 There are days I have to doubt my own eyes and ears. Well, …
Sep 18 2022
Services
I’ve been back from Sunday Mass for about an hour. Since then I’ve been reflecting on an aspect of Christian practice that has occasionally intrigued me. It stems from a brief conversation I had with my pastor, the esteemed Monsignor Christopher Heller, just after Mass. It occurred to me, seemingly by chance, that …
Sep 17 2022
Starting Small
The BLM rioters demonstrated that the “forces of order” were unwilling to enforce the law against them to maintain public order. Riots such as the ones that drove sociologist Charles Murray and other prominent conservative figures out of the halls where they were supposed to appear have reinforced that impression and emboldened the Leftists …
Sep 17 2022
The War On The Church
You might not believe it – after all, the mainstream media never report on atrocities committed against Catholic churches in America – but it’s going on nevertheless. You see, the oh-so-tolerant Left considers us intolerable: THERE WAS NO winner in last month’s vote on abortion rights in Kansas. Technically, nothing changed after …
Sep 16 2022
Sometimes The Laughs Write Themselves
As, for example, in the Left’s reactions to the Abbott / DeSantis / Ducey relocation of a few busloads of illegal aliens to “blue” states: CNN’s fulminations. The Black Lesbian Immigrant’s “thoughts.” Fauxcahontas Had To Weigh In. Martha’s Vineyard “homeless coordinator:” “They’ve Got To Move!” Kamala “The Border is Secure” Harris can’t cope, either. …
Sep 15 2022
A Little Death
[The following essay first appeared at the Palace of Reason on July 19, 2004. It’s also included in my volume The Death Cults: The Drive for Human Extinction. Given what I’ve been reading, and its implications for the perversion of federal law to “protect” the “right” to abortion even in the third trimester of …
Sep 14 2022
What The Usurpers Want Most Of All
This morning, Julie Kelly writes: After nearly two years of lies related to the events of January 6, 2021, the regime finally has admitted the truth: The widening legal dragnet to scoop up Donald Trump, his associates, and his voters has nothing to do with the four-hour disturbance on Capitol Hill that afternoon. …
Sep 13 2022
Twenty-One Years
A few Gentle Readers have written to ask “Why no 9/11 post, Fran?” Honestly, I thought about it for a while, and decided that I had nothing sufficiently fresh to say on the subject. Anyone who’s been following my screeds will know how the event affected me, and frankly, I can no longer afford …
Sep 13 2022
Conversations
As I’ve mentioned before, the C.S.O. and I have been watching a great many British murder mysteries and police procedurals since we terminated our cable-TV subscription. Beth loves the genre, and I’m willing to go along with whatever viewing fare she prefers as long as it holds the trendy PC crap to a minimum. …
Sep 12 2022
The Run-Up Part 2: The Progenitor
If you know of Herbert Marcuse, the following Leftist definition of “liberating tolerance,” from his 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance,” might be familiar to you. If not, read on! Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. As to the scope of this tolerance …
Sep 12 2022
The Run-Up
Scene-setting, stage-dressing, “battlespace preparation,” call it what you will. It didn’t begin with Biden’s fatuous and inflammatory “soul of the nation” speech. It’s been going on for years. It can be traced back at least as far as the November 2000 election of George W. Bush as president. My fear is that it’s …
Sep 11 2022
What Endures?
A different sort of reflection today. Current events combine horror and mind-numbing sameness in equal measure. If I were somehow confined to talking about politics, policy, and current events today, I’d give up talking. I’d rather cut my lawn with a cuticle scissors. In his essay of this morning, Roger Kimball announces a …
Sep 10 2022
Failure By The Numbers
You may not know the statistics, but Divemedic does: Blacks are 13% of the population, but commit 43 to 53 percent of the murders (due to year to year variation) For example, in 2018, 43% of homicides were committed by blacks. Of the nearly 770,000 violent interracial crimes committed every year involving blacks and …
Sep 10 2022
“Our” Media
Democrat Robert Telles, an official in Clark County, Nevada, recently stabbed a journalist, Jeff German, to death. You had to be pretty sharp-eyed to discover Telles’s political affiliation, but it did come out – usually in the 36th paragraph of reports on the homicide. But have a gander at the following: A Democrat elected …
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