The Callisto

 

I am fascinated by tiny houses. From Autoevolution:

Callisto is a single-level tiny house, and within its 320 square feet (29.7 square meters) of floorspace (400 square feet/37 square meters for the 40-foot-long version), you get a spacious living room, a well-equipped kitchen with a separate kitchen island, a full bathroom, and a private bedroom. Everything is on the ground level, offering the comfort and accessibility many are looking for.

This home features two matching entry doors that flank the living space, creating a balanced and symmetrical layout. The main entrance door on the left opens directly into the kitchen, while the secondary glass door across the room breaks up the wall space in the living area, seamlessly connecting the lounge and dining area to the outside.

The central kitchen is cleverly split into highly functional parallel workstations that optimize the use of space and increase functionality. On one side, a linear row of base and upper cabinets forms the main cooking area, with generous counter space, a built-in range, a microwave, and a full-size stainless steel fridge. (Read more.)

 

 

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Democrats’ Southern Strategy

 From Daniel McCarthy from Chronicles:

Don’t believe the Democratic National Committee’s official storyline—the DNC’s decision to make South Carolina the first Democratic presidential primary in 2028 isn’t about introducing more racial diversity into the early contests. It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment, the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.

The fix is in.

South Carolina was the establishment’s firewall against Bernie Sanders’ left-wing insurgency twice over. In 2016, Sanders nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the first caucus, in Iowa, and went on to defeat her in the New Hampshire primary. Four years later, there was a brief moment when Sanders looked like the frontrunner—until he got clobbered by Joe Biden in South Carolina.

It’s true that the black voters who make South Carolina’s primaries more racially diverse than the contests in Iowa or New Hampshire are also less politically radical, so it’s easy for the DNC to say it’s not trying to choke off support for the socialist wing of the party, it’s just giving black voters more of a say.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the left fringe of the party, is disproportionately white—even its New York City chapter is 60 percent white, according to DSA’s own membership polling.

That’s astonishing considering NYC itself is only 34 percent white.

This racial split between the Democrats’ most ideologically intense faction and the party’s elite, which only holds onto power thanks to black voters’ loyalty, is a fault line with the potential to reshape American politics. (Read more.)

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Jason Arday and Jesus the Vulnerable God

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Jason Arday was an academic at Cambridge who got exposed for lying about his past and plagiarizing his papers. Some conservatives are blaming Arday’s death on DEI, while the left says he was undone by racism. While it is important that frauds get called to account, it’s also possible to recognize that the “shame storm” of modern witch hunts can also be too much for some people to bear — and that sometimes the shame storm is out of proportion to the actual crime. (Some shame storms are also entirely created by the media.) 

    While everyone has been dissecting Arday’s academic career and past, I kept thinking of him in those last moments when he decided to take his own life. When he fell terrified and abandoned. He deserved the blowback from his actions, but did not deserve to die. There is a way through these valleys, although suicidal ideation is a hard cross to bear. And the frenzy of commentary following Arday's death is a little too gleeful. Perhaps the wisdom of Pat Buchanan should apply here: “When God puts his hand on a man, I take mine off.”

 The journalist Helen Andrews called the phenomenon of the media swarming a target a “shame storm.” In 2019 Andrews was publicly embarrassed on television when an old boyfriend began insulting her about how their relationship ended. Her shame was debilitating: “Everyone at work was supportive, but no amount of support could counteract the paranoia that settled in over the next weeks and months. My colleagues probably didn’t believe the woman they worked alongside was secretly a comic-book ­villain—but surely the suspicion had been planted? I never knew whether someone on the subway was giving me a second glance because he knew me, or because he recognized me from the video. Fellow journalists reported back to me from conferences where [my ex-boyfriend] Todd expatiated on my depravity at length—in one case, before an audience that included my boss.” (Read more.)

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What Does Marie-Antoinette Mean to Us Now?

 

Posthumous portrait of the Queen by Madame Lebrun

Many people are disgusted by the depiction of Marie-Antoinette in the BBC series. My piece for Catholic Answers:

I first visited Marie-Antoinette’s private retreat at Petit Trianon when I was seventeen years old. It was January, but the birds were singing in the gardens. Then and on successive trips, I experienced a strong sense of timelessness. Others have confided to me a similar feeling of enchantment when wandering through the gardens of Trianon.

People frequently ask me why I write about Marie-Antoinette. One of the reasons is that I keep encountering educated people who really think she said, “Let them eat cake.” I continue to encounter Christians who think Marie-Antoinette was killed as punishment for some egregious wickedness or, at least, for unforgivable stupidity. Having read books about her since childhood, I knew she was misunderstood; it was only after a great deal more research that I came to see how completely false are the common beliefs about her.

But the demonization of Marie-Antoinette in the popular mind is necessary to justify the excesses of the French Revolution. When people have a false and distorted view of history, it is difficult for them to grasp the present, and almost impossible to meet the future with any kind of preparedness.

The French Revolution was not necessary, simply because it is never necessary to murder tens of thousands of people. Reform certainly was needed, but reform can happen without mass murder.

Louis XVI was an intrepid reformer. He was not afraid to break with the past and abolish outdated customs while introducing new ways of doing things. Louis was not resistant to change, although that is how he is usually portrayed. The changes were slow but over time might have been effective, had the violent upheavals not swept everything away.

Too often, the violence is represented as a sad but unavoidable means of achieving freedom and democracy. But it is not only that the French Revolution overturned the social order; it was ultimately an attack on the Catholic Church. Many Catholics were killed, especially those peasants who did not want their religion taken away.

The French Revolution has been the blueprint for every totalitarian regime that has followed and has continued to be the model for those wishing not only to destroy the Catholic Church, but all Christian society. (Read more.)

The portrait above was painted posthumously by Madame Lebrun. Here is a letter from Marie-Thérèse Charlotte to the artist, who was a friend of the family:

 A letter written by Marie-Thérèse Charlotte to Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun on April 15th, 1800, regarding a portrait of Marie Antoinette, which was given to Marie-Thérèse by the comte de Cossé. The duchesse wrote that he gave her…

“…the portrait of my Mother that you had charged him to bring me. You give me the double satisfaction of seeing in a more beautiful work an image very dear to my heart. Judge therefore how grateful I am to you for having used your rare talents to give me this proof of your feelings and be convinced that I am more sensitive to it than I can express to you. You can count equally, Madame, on my feelings for you.”

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How Beijing Laundered $230 Billion in Exports

 From The Enterprise:

Consider a homeowner who installs a good deadbolt on his front door. A month later, he checks his records and finds that no one has forced the front door since the day the lock was installed. He also finds that his television is gone. The lock worked exactly as designed, which is why the thief stopped using the door. What the homeowner needs is not a better lock but a survey of his windows.

In 2018, President Trump used Section 301 to put a real tariff rate on Chinese goods, a price an importer had to actually pay at the border rather than a figure riddled with carve-outs. Chinese exporters responded, as any rational party would, to the price by looking for a cheaper route. They found one, and the route ran through Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and a few dozen other jurisdictions willing to sell a stitch, a stamp, and a certificate of origin.

On Thursday, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Peter Navarro’s shop, published a 25-page report called

The Great Transshipment Scam

. The language was blunt enough that even the Associated Press could not soften it into a story about supply chain diversification. The report describes a global architecture built for one purpose, a lattice of free trade zones, bonded warehouses, processing corridors, and re-export centers. It says plainly that the rerouting “made it look like US imports from China had dropped” while Beijing kept the factories, the workers, the tooling, and the profits. Navarro’s own summary was less clinical. For years, he said, the great transshipment scam has let communist China launder its exports. (Read more.)

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Homebuyers Deserve the Facts About Crime and Schools

 From Chronicles:

Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is, and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good.

Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education. The Trump administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage the Biden administration inflicted is still being felt.

What’s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still prevent real estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.

Interfering with homebuyers was a first-week priority for the Biden administration: Six days after he was sworn into office, Joe Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would scare real estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.

“Diverse and inclusive communities strengthen our democracy,” the executive memorandum began. What mom or dad wants their community to be “inclusive” of failing schools? Who wants diversity to mean mixing criminals with innocent people?

Black families don’t want to live in dangerous or educationally dead-end neighborhoods any more than people of any other color do. (Read more.)

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The King's Touch

I knew the French and English monarchs prayed over those afflicted with scrofula but I did not know it was done in Scotland. When Charles I was crowned King of Scots in June, 1633, he continued the ancient ceremony. From The Scotsman:

Charles had already been crown by the English in 1626, this was the first coronation in Scotland since that of King James VI in 1567, and more notably, the first time an adult had been crowned as our monarch since that of James IV in 1458, who was 15, not an adult? Okay let’s go further back to King James I, he was 30, happy now? The abbey of Scone, traditional place of coronations up to 1424, had been destroyed, and for this occasion the ceremonial was located in the remains of Holyrood abbey, which had seen the coronation of King James II in 1437.

All that remained of the abbey was the nave, the remainder of the church having been demolished in 1570, and the structure was now restored for the occasion. Charles was baptised in the Chapel Royal at Holyrood Palace in 1600 by David Lindsay, Bishop of Ross, and created Duke of Albany, the traditional title of the second son of the King of Scotland.

[...]

While researching this I found an article about Charles and the “laying on of hands” a ceremony he performed while at Holyrood, a practice said to have been performed by all the Stewart monarchs but discontinued by the Hanoverian’s. Bonnie Prince Charlie though is said to have performed it during the 45. (Read more.) 

This is of particular interest to me since Louis XVI was a direct descendant of Charles I. King Louis treasured the ancient healing ceremony and celebrated it several times a year, not just at his coronation, as described in my book.

More HERE.

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Maryland’s Energy Crisis Is a Choice

 From Brian Chisholm:

Maryland’s soaring electricity bills are not a mystery, an accident, or an unavoidable act of nature. They are the predictable result of deliberate policy choices and Maryland families are being forced to pay the bill.

A new fifty-state analysis from Energy Bad Boys exposes a widening divide in American electricity prices. In 2011, average prices in Democratic-led states were reportedly 44% higher than in Republican-led states. By 2025, that gap had widened to 61%. Since 2018, prices in blue states rose 43%, compared with 22% in red states.

That does not prove that party control alone determines a state’s electric bill. Geography, fuel mix, weather, infrastructure, taxes, and market structure all matter. But the pattern is too large and too consistent to ignore: states that prematurely close dependable power plants, restrict natural-gas infrastructure, and impose increasingly aggressive mandates tend to make electricity scarcer and more expensive.

Maryland is a case study in what happens when political ambition outruns engineering and economics. (Read more.)

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The 'Real Indiana Jones'

From BBC:

In 1911, a US professor claimed he had discovered the ancient mountain stronghold of the last Incan king deep in the Peruvian Andes. Yet 53 years later, another explorer proved he was mistaken – and shortly afterwards, a BBC crew followed his trail.

"No one now disputes that this was the site of ancient Vilcabamba." So wrote the Yale academic who brought the Peruvian ruins of Machu Picchu to global attention in 1911. Hiram Bingham III was recruited by locals to look for a lost Incan city fabled for its hidden treasures – and he firmly believed that's what he had found.

Yet 50 years later, Bingham's conviction was challenged by another US explorer nicknamed "the real Indiana Jones". In August 1964, Gene Savoy claimed to have found the same lost city – around 60km (37 miles) northwest of Machu Picchu. He believed his expedition had identified the mountain stronghold of the last Incan king at Espíritu Pampa (the "Plain of the Spirits" or Vilcabamba), a set of ruins in remote cloud forests, high above a tributary of the Amazon. 

Just six weeks after Savoy's discovery, a BBC crew followed in his footsteps, travelling by rubber dinghy (and capsizing) on rapids, ascending steep canyon slopes with mules, and hacking through jungle to the site. "Scraps of information they'd picked up on the way made them doubt some of Savoy's claims," revealed the presenter. "But, having come so far, they had to get on and see for themselves."

The stakes were high. Perhaps they would find "the heart of an unknown city, where it seems likely the last Inca emperor gathered the remnants of his people". (Read more.)

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