Lane Scott

Catholic Claremonster PhD, mother of five. Raising beef, pork, poultry, veg and flowers on our ranch. My husband runs a USA manufacturing co and we build houses

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

I don't think God often lets us go so long without gifting us a sturdy dose of self-knowledge.
May God be as gracious and merciful with Joshua Charles on that day as He has no doubt been with all of us.

[Joshua Charles🇻🇦 @JoshuaTCharles]

This was one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written.

I publicly, but gently corrected a barber for taking Our Lord’s name in vain. I didn’t have authority over him. I didn’t command him. I asked him to show more respect for Christ and His authority, because as King of heaven and earth He was entitled to greater respect.

He, a non-Catholic—not even a Christian, as far as I know—repented on the spot! He’s never done it again (in my presence, at least).

I did the same for a dear friend of mine who was an atheist. The next day, he apologized to me (and even said he intended no disrespect for Christ). He and his whole family are Catholic today.

Tons of Catholic women loved this post.

Now do the public sin of immodesty, ladies. Is there some gray? Sure. But it’s not mere opinion, as so many like to pretend. It’s often one of those sins that “you know it when you see it.” It’s quite obvious in many cases when someone is using their body in unholy ways. In many cases, you know, and we know. And if you don’t know, praise God for using a fellow Catholic to bring it to your attention! These are the sorts of things Christians should rejoice over.

If the person making the comment is wrong, they’re wrong. But to act as if you have no duty in this matter—a duty any Catholic has a right to hold you to—is diabolical insanity. And you have the same duty toward other Catholics, including men.

If you—a Catholic woman with a far higher duty of loyalty to Christ than my unbelieving barber—can’t bear to to hear/consider from a fellow Catholic a request that you dress more modestly, then my godless barber gets Christianity better than you do.

Stop gaslighting yourselves into the arms of Satan.

“Women should adorn themselves modestly and sensibly in seemly apparel…”

1 Timothy 2:9

“My brethren, if any one among you wanders from the truth and some one brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner from the error of his way will save his soul from death and will cover a multitude of sins.”

James 5:19-20

[Adele Scalia @AdeleScalia]

I’m so glad I got married before so many Catholic men became *this*, otherwise I would have definitely married outside of the church. I feel so sad for single Catholic women now.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@countyhwy We did this in rural California. Almost these exact numbers 15-20 years ago. It has been a great life.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@pegobry_en Time to shut down Professional Catholics, inc.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@CatholicPods I think probably delete this.
I mean God knows; we could all do more. But the Church does distinguish between active and contemplative vocations for a reason. The prayer life of a good father w/ extremely heavy job probably doesn't look identical to that of a priest or religious

[Fairer Disputations @FairerSexFD]

Our extraordinary lineup includes @erikabachiochi, @FavaleAbs, @Louise_m_perry, @miriam_cates, @theologianmom, @SerenaSigillito, @moveincircles, @JenniferLahl, @HSRdirector, @Nina_Power_, @freyaindiaa, @LeahLibresco, @LaneSmithScott, @rclu, and @helen_of_roy...

[Fairer Disputations @FairerSexFD]

This September, @FairerSexFD Featured Authors and friends are convening in New York for two and a half days to find a better way forward for women. If you’re interested in attending, email [email protected] with a short bio and why you’d like to join us. Space is very limited.

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

I grew up poor, raised by a man with an Ivy League degree.

3 luxuries matter:

Home-cooked meals.

A car that starts every time you turn the key.

Two weeks of vacation each year.

Everything else is BE.

And yes, I said luxuries. We ate at one reasonably priced restaurant maybe six times a year. I didn’t even taste sushi until I was in college.

Even those luxuries were limited. Every meal was made with store-brand groceries.

The cars were reliable used cars. Ask AI for “the most reliable used car with the lowest resale value.”

Vacations = free museums, state parks, beaches, battlefields, and camping. No Disney. Hershey or Six Flags maybe once a year.

The essentials?

Clothes: Salvation Army. Honestly, this one sucked, but today Walmart & Target make it easier.

Fixer-upper: I’m talking serious problems. You need a solid foundation, walls & a roof. Everything else can be fixed with Harbor Freight tools, YouTube, and sweat equity. We literally bought an abandoned house in a good neighborhood.

I live in rural Massachusetts. My neighborhood has $1 million homes. I bought an abandoned house and restored it, but just outside my neighborhood there are still homes for $300,000.

Medical: Before settling down, one of you should get a government job with benefits or join the military before having kids.

Time: This is the hardest part. My dad was a firefighter, so he’d work double shifts, then spend his days off repairing the house.

Activities: Boy Scouts, Civil Air Patrol, church choir, church camp, etc. Sign your kids up for free or cheap activities.

Education: Teach your kids everything you know. Read to them for an hour every night.

DAD INTEL: This is the big one. Build a network. Know where to get discounted building materials, who has tools, who’ll loan you a trailer or skid steer. Firefighters, cops, National Guard members, tradesmen & church communities have always been great for this, but those networks are disappearing.

Family: Live within three hours of relatives if you can. Someday you’ll need emergency babysitting or another guy to help lift something heavy.

What to avoid like the plague:

NO COSTCO: Unless you’re extremely disciplined, you’ll buy more than you need.

NO HOME DEPOT: Lumber isn’t always the best value, tools are overpriced, and those marble countertops start looking “necessary.” Formica from a local building supply works just fine.

NO FLIGHTS. We won a trip to London when I was five. It nearly bankrupted us. No flights anywhere.

Fast food. This was my dad’s biggest weakness because it was cheap and easy.

Again: NO RESTAURANTS. They add up fast, and you’re paying for convenience more than nutrition.

No drinking or drugs. Bad decisions usually start with small compromises.

No expensive hobbies. Your hobby is fixing the house, improving the yard, and coaching your kid’s Little League team. Fish from shore if you want a hobby. Dig for worms. You don’t need $15 lures.

No subscriptions. You don’t need Netflix. I have plenty of money now and didn’t even own a TV until recently. You don’t need home security cameras if you own an inexpensive firearm. You don’t need Uber or constant Amazon deliveries.

Now the big one:

You’ll feel like shit. You’ll think you’ve failed as a dad. You’ll envy the families with nicer houses, newer cars, and bigger vacations.

Don’t.

This is not a competition.

Your job is to be a great father, love your wife, raise capable kids, and become a productive member of society.

The antidote is gratitude.

Go to church. Every Sunday, thank God for what you have. Gratitude is critical.

It also helps if your work serves the public: firefighter, police officer, teacher, construction worker, sanitation worker, military.

Mental health problems? Start with the basics. Stay physically active, journal for 30 minutes a day & pray a full rosary.

“But John, that’s extreme.”

Maybe. But you’ll still be better off than 80% of Europoors.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@JohannKurtz Congrats on a great piece, Johann!

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@itsme_urstruly I love the dun color

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@DixieDillonLane When PG& E treated us all to blackouts on the regular in Northern California a few years back we got to find out. It's nice in some ways, other than the heat. You and your kids go to bed much earlier without electricity. Like camping; you'd be amazed how tired you get by 7pm

[Tom Harwood @tomhfh]

The most stunningly successful thing about the American experiment is that in the late 1700s, the thirteen colonies were hardly valuable at all.

They had no known great natural resources, they were far from a jewel in the crown of the British Empire.

The British were far more desperate to keep the profitable sugar islands than the thirteen colonies. That’s why upon the entry of the French to the war, peace was sought soon - and the priority was to keep the profitable Caribbean and control of the seas.

In seeking peace, Britain was thinking with its treasury not its heart. War is expensive. And while losing the thirteen colonies was embarrassing, it was not the kind of hit to the British economy that losing other colonies would have represented.

In stark contrast to the relatively barren North America, the Spanish Empire in South America had vast obvious natural resources. Spain extracted gold. But it never built anything to last.

The United States of America proved what far too many countries are yet to understand today.

The wealth of a nation is not in its natural resources. It is not fixed. The world is not zero sum.

America became the wealthiest country on the face of the planet, not thanks to its soil - but thanks to the men who stood on it.

The institutions they built - the English liberties they codified - created the basis for a stable, prosperous, market economy. Freedom under law.

It’s thanks to the systems of government the founders built that the United States became what it is today.

Were any other group of people - with any other ideas about how a society should be structured - to settle that land, America would be like any other country today.

But it isn’t. And that’s thanks to the enlightened ideas of its founding.

Happy Treason Day, cousins. 🇬🇧🇺🇸

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@DrewTumaABC7 California is glorious this summer. 10/10

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

If you want a homeschool/public school hybrid, see if you can enroll in a public charter with independent study option.
We did that for elementary and then my teens went to ind study at the public high school, which means 3 part days/wk and sports, basically. Best of all options

[𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 @shagbark_hick]

Crazy as it sounds, there might be an argument for sending kids to public school every other year, alternating between homeschooling.

Would give the kid measured doses of the real world outside the family bubble, punctuated by extended sabbaticals in homeschool fantasy-land.

I say this because homeschooling really cannot replicate the "sink or swim" social environment of the schoolyard. It's good for a kid to be away from mommy in the chaos of a kids-only environment. It's good to realize that life isn't some kind of comfy bubble but a place with real social consequences.

Failing this it's easy for homeschooled kids to be very sensitive, thin-skinned, precious. I see this with a lot of the folks I've met from that world -- particularly the men. They really can't handle hearing someone say "fuck you" to them, it's crushing to them. Many of them have never gotten in a fight or dealt with unreasonable or mean people ever.

But then, after a year of that -- they can come home, ramble off into the woods, have long solitary days of reading away from the Lord of the Flies realities of life in "gen pop" for a year. They could selectively have the public school friends they like over in the evenings or in the summers. Then boom -- back to reality again.

Seems like it could actually generate a pretty good result if you did it right. But few would try it because so many people have this "all or nothing" mentality about schooling methods.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@shagbark_hick As long as they are fine with being relatively worse off, and they don't vote for the WASP work ethic to support them in their leisure. 30-hour work week siesta style life is awesome as long as they aren't jealous of those who work more and have more.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

Read to find out what Sheen's political philosophy was, and why he called it "Americanism."
Amazing development of both a theory of human liberty and also a theory of government.
Fulton Sheen, pray for us

[Chronicles Magazine @ChroniclesMag]

Remembering Bishop Fulton Sheen

Bishop Fulton Sheen understood that Catholicism and Americanism go together, that to be a good Catholic, one must be a patriot.

Lane Scott (@LaneSmithScott) writes for the June issue of Chronicles: https://t.co/K9koMaZAtE

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

He sucked. My great uncle, whom Roosevelt sent to war after campaigning as an isolationist, *loathed* him. I'll never forget the sound of the disdain in his voice whenever he spoke about FDR.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

FDR is the most overrated president in American history and it is not close.

People treat him like a saint. The reality is he inherited a recession and turned it into the longest depression in the history of the developed world. Every other major economy on earth recovered faster than the United States did under FDR. Sit with that. We had the most resources, the most industry, the most capacity, and we recovered slower than countries that got bombed.

Unemployment was still 19% in 1938. Six years into the New Deal. Six years of "bold experimentation" and one in five Americans still could not find work.

Why? Because his policies were economically illiterate. The NIRA cartelized entire industries and made it illegal to lower prices during a deflationary collapse. He paid farmers to slaughter livestock and plow under crops while people stood in bread lines. He launched a war on business so aggressive that investment dried up because nobody knew what insane rule was coming next. Even his own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, admitted in 1939 that they had spent enormous sums and "it does not work" and that unemployment was as high as when they started.

Then in 1937 his policies triggered a second brutal crash so embarrassing the textbooks gave it its own polite little nickname, the "Roosevelt Recession," so they would not have to attach his name to the failure in the obvious way.

A UCLA study in 2004 concluded the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by roughly seven years. Seven years of extra suffering sold to you as heroism.

So what actually saved the economy? Not the alphabet agencies. Not the fireside chats. A world war. Twelve million men shipped overseas and the entire planet's industrial competition reduced to rubble. That is the "recovery." That is the legacy.

Strip away Pearl Harbor and FDR is a guy who took a bad recession and stretched it into a decade of misery with bad economics and a cult of personality. He is not ranked on results. He is ranked on the luck of being in the chair when Hitler invaded Poland.

Greatest marketing job in the history of the presidency. Nothing more.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

Most boring aristocracy of all time

[Esteban @steveonomics]

It’s astounding to me that every San Francisco tech bro feels they need $10 million to escape the permanent underclass when their only hobbies are buying hoodies and going on hikes.

[Jeffrey A Tucker @jeffreytucker]

The revelations six years later are pouring out so quickly that it is impossible to keep up much less mentally process all this:

* The Director of National Intelligence has documented 120 US-funded/owned biolabs in 30 countries many of which are manufacturing and manipulating infectious diseases.

* Senator Rand Paul's committee has released the receipts concerning US funding/backing of the manufactured SARS-CoV-2 virus/vaccine as part of this program.

* Senator Johnson has produced definitive evidence that US public health agencies knew of the grave dangers of the shot to everyone but said nothing.

* Many officials are privately admitting/proving that the whole point of lockdowns was to preserve population immunity for the shot and block other avenues toward wellness.

* Hardly any of this makes the national news and one wonders if the public mind has any awareness at all.

[Lane Scott @LaneSmithScott]

@AntiCommieBecca There has to be constant exponential growth because previous generations built that assumption in to the total boomer luxury socialist state