Theories About Da Vinci

From The Atlantic:

We will be hearing a lot about Leonardo this year, the 500th anniversary of his death. Exhibits are being readied in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. In May, the Queen’s Gallery, at Buckingham Palace, will display Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection (which owns about 500 of them). A major exhibition at the Louvre, which is home to five Leonardo paintings, including the Mona Lisa, will open in October. So a wealth of Leonardo will be on display. Also on display—it never really stops—will be the musings of those who believe that they have finally solved some urgent Leonardo mystery, a mystery that might exist, like beauty, only in the mind of the beholder. (Read more.)

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The Modern Bonfire of the Vanities

From American Greatness:

San Francisco is the latest case in point. Earlier this month, the high school convened a “reflection and action working group” to determine the fate of a pair of 83-year-old murals depicting George Washington. The group determined the artwork is “highly problematic” and “traumatic” for students, since one of the murals presents George Washington next to several laboring slaves, and the other represents a dead Native American. The working group’s choice follows an earlierdecision in February by a school-board committee that the art “glorifies slavery, genocide, colonization, manifest destiny, white supremacy, oppression, etc.” 

What’s particularly moronic about this attempt to erase history is that the original painter of the murals, Victor Arnautoff, didn’t even intend to glorify President Washington. Arnautoff was a Communist who depicted Washington in such a way to “provoke a nuanced evaluation of his legacy,” namely, to call attention to the human costs of slavery and manifest destiny. (Read more.)

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Death of Queen Elizabeth Woodville

Of plague. But why is it mentioned 19 years after the fact? Strange. From The Guardian:

A 500-year-old letter discovered in the National Archives has revealed that the “White Queen” Elizabeth Woodville, the grandmother of Henry VIII, may have died of the plague. Elizabeth, the wife of Edward IV, mother of Edward V and maternal grandmother of Henry VIII, died in 1492 after spending the last five years of her life in Bermondsey Abbey in London. No cause of death was recorded at the time, and there are no known contemporary accounts of her passing. However, while digging through transcripts and translations of Venetian documents relating to England, National Archives records specialist Euan Roger stumbled on a letter from the Venetian ambassador to London, written 19 years after her death. 

The letter, dated July 1511, sees the ambassador, Andrea Badoer, state that “the Queen-Widow, mother of King Edward, has died of plague, and the King is disturbed”. Roger said the ambassador could only be referring to Elizabeth Woodville, mother of the princes in the Tower and a woman renowned for her “lynx-eyed” beauty, which drew the attention of Edward IV. It is the only known reference to Elizabeth’s death being caused by plague, but Roger believes that if the queen did in fact die in this way, it provides an alternative explanation of why accounts of her funeral are so modest. (Read more.)

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Elisabeth of France – Martyr and Servant of God

From History of Royal Women:

Elisabeth and Clotilde were raised by Madame the Marsan, Governess to the Children of France. The two sisters couldn’t be more different. Clotilde had “the happiest disposition, which needed only to be encouraged and aided” while Elisabeth was “proud, inflexible, passionate and had intolerable defects.” Nevertheless, they were quite close, and Clotilde taught her sister the alphabet. The Abbé de Montégut, canon of Chartres, was appointed to tutor the children in 1774 and he instilled in Elisabeth the religious sentiments that would never leave her. When Elisabeth was 10, her grandfather King Louis XV died, and he was succeeded by her elder brother, now King Louis XVI and his wife Marie-Antoinette, barely out of their teens. For now, Elisabeth would remain at her studies, but Clotilde was destined to marry. The sisters were parted for the first time when Clotilde married the future King Charles Emmanuel IV of Sardinia. Marie-Antoinette wrote to her mother, “My sister Elisabeth is a charming child, who has intelligence, character, and much grace; she showed the greatest feeling, and much above her age, at the departure of her sister. The poor little girl was in despair, and as her health is very delicate, she was taken ill and had a severe nervous attack. I own to my dear mamma that I fear I am getting too attached to her, feeling, from the example of my aunts, how essential it is for her happiness not to remain an old maid in this country.” (Read more.)

More HERE.  A collection of pictures and posts, HERE.

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A Voice of Reason

From Commentary:

Shapiro’s conception of the West is different from that of others who in recent years have taken up her cause. For those writers—think Steven Pinker and the like—the West sprang up, abruptly and miraculously, with the advent of Enlightenment skepticism, scientific rationalism, and modern capitalism. In Shapiro’s view, however, at the heart of that “West” is a “mechanistic, materialist vision of human beings and the universe.”

He decisively rejects that vision. Indeed, he traces many of today’s moral and political disorders to it. As he sees it, we are descending into racial tribalism and wild utopian politics, “moral subjectivism,” and corrosive individualism, because we have willfully severed our societies from their deepest roots. Those are the Mosaic law and its universalization by Jesus of Nazareth, and Greek philosophy, with its confidence in the power of human reason to understand the natural and moral worlds.

Shapiro resolved to write the book after he got a terrifying dose of our modern disorders in early 2016, when a group of conservative students invited him to give a speech at California State University at Los Angeles. It took dozens of armed, uniformed police officers, plus Shapiro’s own private security team, to get the author safely in and out of the college venue, so ravenous and violent was the mob that sought to silence him. (Read more.)

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The Essence of Evil

From the Toluidine Blue blog:

It is estimated that there are 100,000 to 150,000 under-aged child sex workers in the U.S. These girls aren’t volunteering to be sex slaves. They’re being lured—forced—trafficked into it. In most cases, they have no choice. In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.  

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade. No doubt about it: this is a highly profitable, highly organized and highly sophisticated sex trafficking business that operates in towns large and small, raking in upwards of $9.5 billion a year in the U.S. alone by abducting and selling young girls for sex. Every year, the girls being bought and sold gets younger and younger. The average age of those being trafficked is 13. (Read more.)

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An 1829 Almanac

From East of the Sun, West of the Moon:

Poole’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Polite Assistant
and useful remembrancer
for the Year 1829
containing an almanack
the births deaths and marriages &c of the Soveriegn Princes of Europe
lists of Both Houses of Parliament
ruled pages for engagements cash accounts and various other articlesof useful information
To be continued annually
London Printed for J Poole et al

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The ‘Equality Act’ is a Danger to American Women

From Human Events:

This legislation has no rules about what constitutes a legitimate claim to “gender identity” as a protected class. Any male (or female) can claim identity as the opposite sex without proof of medical diagnosis or permanent intent. Sex-based identity is completely subjective and determined by perception or desire and can be changed at any time.

Society’s purpose for sex-segregation, a major factor of women’s safety, is negated under this legislation. Women could no longer claim rights to our safety and equal protections because men could claim our rights just by claiming to be women. Perhaps the sponsor of this bill, a gay man, doesn’t understand our concerns. Women are safer in places they know men can’t legitimately access. 

If this bill passes, men, go ahead, put on your makeup and take a walk in a women’s locker room for a day. You don’t have to prove anything, just claim your feminine side. Women would be commanded to open the door to any female-posing male who wants access to women’s sex-specific spaces. (Read more.)

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