A Second Civil War?

From PJB:

Two years ago, Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe called the giant statues of Lee and "Stonewall" Jackson on Richmond's Monument Avenue "parts of our heritage." After Charlottesville, New York-born-and-bred McAuliffe, entertaining higher ambitions, went full scalawag, demanding the statues be pulled down as "flashpoints for hatred, division, and violence." Who hates the statues, Terry? Who's going to cause the violence? Answer: The Democratic left whom Terry must now appease. McAuliffe is echoed by Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam, the Democratic candidate in November to succeed McAuliffe. GOP nominee Ed Gillespie wants Monument Avenue left alone. The election is the place to decide this, but the left will not wait.

In Durham, North Carolina, our Taliban smashed the statue of a Confederate soldier. Near the entrance of Duke University Chapel, a statue of Lee has been defaced, the nose broken off. Wednesday at dawn, Baltimore carried out a cultural cleansing by taking down statues of Lee and Maryland Chief Justice Roger Taney who wrote the Dred Scott decision and opposed Lincoln's suspension of the right of habeas corpus.

Like ISIS, which smashed the storied ruins of Palmyra, and the al-Qaida rebels who ravaged the fabled Saharan city of Timbuktu, the new barbarism has come to America. This is going to become a blazing issue, not only between but within the parties. (Read more.)

More on the violence in Charlottesville from The American Thinker:

I've been suspicious of the nature of the violence at this supposed Alt-Right demonstration since the news first began breaking.  It is no secret that radical elements in the Democrat left have been routinely utilizing violence when it suits their purposes.  We also know via secret tapings by Project Veritas that the Democratic Party has a semi-official director of dirty ops, Dick Creamer, who hires, trains, and emplaces professional disruptors to encounter, engage, and infiltrate conservative demonstrations to foment violence, assuring that the demonstrations then become the targets of negative media attention – naturally, against the conservative side.  Creamer was caught on videotape boasting about his nefarious capabilities when he thought he was in friendly company.

So here we now have another blown supposedly conservative demonstration, where violence erupts and people are killed, and guess who just happens to be a ringleader of the various ultra-right to Alt-Right organizations ranging from KKK and neo-Nazis to the kind of patriotic folks who might go to a Flag Day celebration!  Um, that would be our vaporous political will o' the wisp, Jason Kessler, whose Occupy activities may well have put him in operational cahoots with high-level Democrat operatives.  And owing to the leniency of Virginia open carry laws, too many of Jason's followers just had to parade their personal armories in all their camo combat gear, showing off their minuteman firepower.  My first reaction at seeing those clowns strutting down the street like they were in Mosul was, like that of many of my fellow NRA members and military veterans, shaking my fist and yelling at the TV, "No!  No!  No, you idiots!  No!"  And that kind of award-winning stupidity makes me wonder if the head planner for the event, Jason Soros...er, Kessler, didn't have that firepower demonstration all lined up and ready to go precisely to make those right-wing tools look just like the fools they were being, while scaring the bejeezus out of the lefties, blacks, and MSM twerps.

There's still not enough evidence on the actual violence, other than the schizophrenic kid who ran over the woman, to make any kind of assessment as to who did what in the confrontations between the right-wing demonstrators and the surprisingly strong counter-demonstration.  I have to wonder if this Kessler fellow, strong Barack Obama-supporter that he is, had a hand in making sure his Alt-Right marchers were clearly guaranteed to encounter a strong crowd of riled up counter-protesters as well.  The reporting of Kessler's background, as well as that of Charlottesville mayor and Democrat activist Mike Signer and Vice Mayor Wes Bellamy, has convinced me that Charlottesville was a Democratic Party black operation, planned, organized, and carried out to its successful conclusion, to make the media portray all these conservative whites as stupid, racist, and violent.  I believe that it was done by this soulless young man, who succeeded in selling himself to the dumb-bunny right-wingers as one of them. (Read more.)

HistoryNet reports on Charlottesville's Civil War legacy:

Here are some fast facts about the city during the Civil War era.

1. Charlottesville, with a population of about 3,000 people, remained on the fringes of the war. Perhaps the only noteworthy conflict was a skirmish on the northern outskirts of town on Feb. 29, 1864, in the so-called Battle of Rio Hill.

2. The Union forces at Rio Hill were led by Brig. Gen. George Armstrong Custer. But he of the flowing locks bungled it – perhaps foreshadowing disaster 10 years later at Little Big Horn. At Rio Hill, Custer and his 1,500 soldiers attempted to raid a Confederate camp, but Custer mistakenly believed an accidental explosion was enemy artillery fire and fled with his troops, chased out by members of Confederate forces under command of Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart.

3. The University of Virginia, like Charlottesville itself, escaped the war’s ravages. The student body, however, answered the call of the Southern cause. Strong supporters of secession from the Union, about 500 of the university’s 600 enrollees in 1861 joined the Confederate army, as did more than 2,000 alumni.

4. UVA’s enrollment plummeted in the war years. In 1862-1863, there were 46 students enrolled. Only eight went on to graduate, but the university never closed.

5. Charlottesville also contributed to the cause through industry, producing swords, uniforms and artificial limbs. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood was so pleased with his Charlottesville-made right leg that he declared, “The Charlottesville leg is far better than the French one.”

6. Charlottesville was site of medical facilities, including a hospital, that treated wounded and sick Confederate soldiers. Ultimately, Charlottesville General Hospital treated 22,700 patients during the Civil War and employed 300 people.

7. African Americans outnumbered whites in Charlottesville at the time of the Civil War. In Albemarle County, of which Charlottesville is a part, 55 percent of 26,615 residents were African American. Of those 14,512, all but 606 were free blacks. Today, about 107,000 people live in the county, 81 percent of them white and 10 percent African American.

8. Charlottesville surrendered to Union forces. Despite Custer’s retreat at Rio Hill, he and Gen. Philip Sheridan formally accepted the town’s surrender on March 3, 1865. Little more than a month later, Lee surrendered the Confederacy to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in a ceremony at Appomattox Court House, about 60 miles south of Charlottesville. (Read more.)
 

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Unless We Turn Back to God

From Matt Walsh:

We are divided as a people. I’d say we’re even more divided now than we were during the run up to the (first?) Civil War. At least back then the two sides had some very fundamental things in common. They believed in God, they loved their families, they cared about virtue and valor.

These days, you can’t get a consensus on anything. Forget about living in two separate countries — we’re living in two separate universes. Hundreds of different universes, really. I have little in common with a modern leftist, but I have even less in common with an alt-right neo-Nazi. Who is on my side? I don’t even know anymore. We’re all strangers to each other. Even as men met on the battlefield in 1862 and visited horrific violence upon on another, there existed a mutual respect, a sense of honor, and similarity. We have no respect for one another. We laugh at the concept of honor. We laugh at all that is good and decent. We laugh at each other. We hate each other. That seems to be the only thing we have in common. (Read more.)

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A Floral Fantasy

Featured on East of the Sun, West of the Moon: A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden, Illustrated by Walter Crane, 1899. Available to read online for free

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Next: Banning Our Founding Fathers?

From The Federalist Papers:

This is an incredibly slippery slope. All of America’s Founding Fathers were imperfect men. Most were slave-owners, and I have no doubt others were genuine scoundrels. But we owe them a debt of gratitude no matter what sins they may have committed. As Jay Cost writes: “If I contract somebody to paint my house, and I find out later that he is an adulterer, does that excuse me from paying what I owe? Of course not. By the same token, my debt for the painting does not oblige me to act as though he did not wrong his spouse.”

So it goes with the Founders who owned slaves: We should appreciate them for their endeavors, for our lives are manifestly better because of their struggles, but honoring them does not require us to ignore or excuse their errors. Madison’s home Montpelier, for example, just opened an exhibition, “The Mere Distinction of Colour,” exploring slavery at the plantation.

Wiping out America’s history because there are parts of it that are unsettling or unappealing is a leftist way of trying to re-write what this country was founded upon. If you can depict America’s founders as malevolent, evil men, you can paint the entire nation that way. (Read more.)

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Elimination of the "Unfit"

From Herman Cain:

You want to denounce Nazis? Here you go, America. Don't tell me again about the moral imperative to denounce Nazis if you're going to let this slide. As Rob mentioned to me when we were discussing who would write this up, the essence of Hitler's eugenics program was to filter out children who didn't have the traits deemed optimal for the Aryan race. Horrifying? Obviously. You'd have a fit if they started aborting babies for having brown skin, or - if there was some way you could tell - for being gay.

And you should have that fit.

But you don't need to wait. You can have the fit right now, because Iceland is well down this road. There, expectant mothers are given blood tests to determine if there's a likelihood their baby will have Down Syndrome. And if it looks that way? Well, the mothers are informed that most abort under these circumstances. No one wants a child who doesn't have the perfect designer genes, you understand, so Iceland is now to the point where almost 100 percent of mothers who are told their babies will probably have Down Syndrome go ahead and have said babies killed. (Read more.)

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Bouquet of Flowers in an Urn

From your friendly neighborhood art historian:

Today’s artwork is Jan van Huysum’s Bouquet of Flowers in an Urn, which was painted in 1724. This clever composition juxtaposes a variety of flowers, all of which appear to be in full bloom, with a number of insects such as different kinds of butterflies and ants.

Although the composition looks as if the flowers were placed aimlessly in a bouquet, in reality they weren’t. In fact, the different kinds of flowers shown here, normally bloom in different seasons throughout the year. Thus, it would have been impossible for Van Huysum to have painted this work in one go. Rather, each flower was painted as it became available, arranged within the composition according to the artist’s wishes.

Jan van Huysum’s interest in nature is evident here. Flower painters often had an interest in botanical studies and would spend hours upon hours studying, classifying and drawing each individual flower. Look at this detail! (Read more.)

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A Warning from Cardinal Burke

From Life Site:

To treat every word uttered by the Pope as if it were official Church teaching would be to fall into an “idolatry of the papacy,” said Cardinal Raymond Burke in a recent address at a Catholic conference in Kentucky.  The Cardinal, who spoke at the July 22 “Church Teaches Forum” in Louisville, said that Catholics seeking to remain true to Christ and the Church he founded must learn to discern between the “words of the man who is Pope and the words of the Pope as Vicar of Christ on earth.”

“Pope Francis has chosen to speak often in his first body, the body of the man who is Pope. In fact, even in documents which, in the past, have represented more solemn teaching, he states clearly that he is not offering magisterial teaching but his own thinking,” the Cardinal said. “But those who are accustomed to a different manner of Papal speaking want to make his every statement somehow part of the Magisterium. To do so is contrary to reason and to what the Church has always understood,” he continued. 

“It is simply wrong and harmful to the Church to receive every declaration of the Holy Father as an expression of papal teaching or magisterium,” he added. (Read more.)

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"My lot walked, my lot starved"

From The Guardian:

The teenage McGann, who would grow up to play Dr Turner in Call the Midwife, was immediately overcome with what he describes as a “weird passion” for genealogy. He solemnly promised his ancestors he would find out more about the history of the McGanns.

Fast-forward 37 years and we are discussing Flesh and Blood, the 300-odd page book that finally fulfils that solemn promise. In it, McGann, who at 54 is the youngest of the four McGann actor brothers, looks back at the history of his family through the lens of seven maladies: hunger, pestilence, exposure, trauma, breathlessness, heart problems and necrosis. He discusses how health and education – or a lack of them – have driven medical progress and social change in Britain, and how these changes have dramatically altered the fortunes of the McGanns.

“My family’s story is intimately related to the progress of this nation, because of the relationship between social history, public health and physical medical health. Until the welfare state, my family subsisted. After the welfare state, they thrived. I feel, in my family, the burden of the legacy of history very keenly.”

McGann, who has an MA in science communications, explains that genealogy is detective work: “You see these wonderful antiquated Latin terms on death certificates and very quickly realise that to understand the cause of death, you have to understand those medical terms in their wider sense. The purpose of genealogy – to gain self-knowledge, to answer questions like who am I? Where do I come from? – has to expand to embrace what a particular medical term means in that time, in that place, right there. I focus on health as an antagonist in the book because that’s the beat that drives the central characters on.” (Read more.)

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