Isabel and Her Daughters

Queen Isabel of Castile was a conscientious and vigilant mother. To quote:

Isabel was highly preoccupied with her daughters’ moral and religious education and, if her library is a guide, they would have spent time studying the lives of saints and other devotional works. The Carro de las donas, by the Franciscan monk Francesc Eiximenis, was one of a number of “how to raise your daughters” manuals that sat on the royal bookshelf…

In Isabel’s fastidious court, men and women stayed apart. Catherine slept in Isabel’s chamber, along with her sisters. Doctors and other men were not allowed into the quarters until all of them, and the ladies-in-waiting who also slept there, were up and dressed. The women also ate apart in the intimacy of Isabel’s chambers. The infantas and their mother emerged from this feminine bunker only to eat with others when there were important visitors, in which case the full spectacle of the public court went into action…

Segregation did not mean that there was no fun to be had at her mother’s side. Tales of chivalry were told or sung after dinner with Isabel herself sighing at the tragic bits. Among other things, Catherine would have heard the retelling of old battles from the war in Granada. She must also have heard the famous romantic legends of the land she was destined to travel to. Arthur, the Round Table, the Holy Grail, Lancelot and Merlin were all characters in the rich chivalrous imagination of the Spanish court. They were there in Isabel’s books and on her tapestries too…

Board games, chess, word games and cards were played. There was music too, at the table. This may have been devoted to chivalry or courtly love when Isabel was there… Musicians were always on hand. They were, indeed, among the best-paid people at court. Spain already boasted a long tradition of troubadours and popular songs coming especially from north-west Galicia and the Moslem territories of al-Andalus. (Read more.)

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Another Trans Murder

 From The Post-Millennial:

The cause of death in the killing of William Evans-Ellis, the mentally handicapped 7-year-old allegedly murdered by his mother and two trans-identified males, has now been confirmed by the Hamilton County Coroner's Office. The 7-year-old from Oakley, Ohio was discovered dead last week after suffering extensive abuse.

William's mother, Kaitlin Evans, 39, has been charged with murder and child endangerment, as have trans-identified males Kirby Rankin, 33, and Nessa Keaney, 23. The transgender male lovers of Evans shared a home with her and the boy. Rankin was previously known as Nathan Rankin, while Keaney was previously known as Adamhnán Keaney.

Speaking to reporters on August 11, Hamilton County Coroner Dr. Lakshmi Sammarco explained that a blunt force injury to William's head was what killed him. The mother and trans lovers allegedly caused "bruises too numerous to count" on the boy's body, and Sammarco estimated he had been dead roughly a day by the time officers found him, per Cincinnati.com. Sammarco reflected on the difficulty of the case: "This is a hard case for everybody... We always say that we expect the worst, but sometimes we get it." (Read more.)

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The Duty of the Medieval Princess

 From Sharon Bennett Connolly:

From dutiful daughters to runaway nuns, from empresses to rebels. The life of a medieval princess was, perhaps, not as predictable as we have been led to believe. At times, it is true, they were married off to a foreign prince, never to see England or their family again. But we can count the number of girls that happened to on one hand. Which is quite remarkable, given the distances and pace of travel in medieval times, when a horse could cover around 20 miles a day and a horse litter, the popular form of travel for noble women, would cover far less than that.

Some princesses even visited home after they married or were visited by members of their family; some never even left England.

Marrying your daughter to a prince in a distant land and never hearing from her again was not the purpose of a royal marriage. It was never in the king’s interest to abandon his daughter, or sister, once she was married abroad. Royal daughters were raised to be a personal and diplomatic link to their homeland. They were the means of keeping communications open when all other options failed; private letters were used to warn against treachery or prevent a breakdown in diplomatic relations.

Some did escape this destiny. For instance, a number of William the Conqueror’s daughters became nuns. Cecilia had that life decided for her from a young age, but Adelida appears to have chosen this course after a number of failed marriage proposals. Perhaps she had had enough of the royal marriage market? King Stephen’s daughter, Mary, was also destined for the Church, with her parents even founding a religious house for her. Kidnapped for her royal blood, and forced into marriage, she would return to the convent after becoming a mother. The scandal was not of her making, unlike Gunhild, the daughter of King Harold II, who seems to have had a rather relaxed attitude to marriage and relationships; a woman before her time – by about 1,000 years! Gunhild had spent time in the convent, possibly having sought sanctuary after the Norman Conquest. There is uncertainty as to whether she ever took her vows; though the church seemed to believe she had and sought her return to the cloistered life. (Read more.)

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Charles I and Henrietta Maria Departing for the Chase

 From The Royal Collection Trust:

 In this ambitious large scale double portrait by Daniel Mytens the King and Queen are depicted on a terrace as they prepare to depart on a hunting excursion. Surrounded by lively dogs, they are attended by the court dwarf, Jeffrey Hudson and an African servant who brings their horses. The unusual composition, in which the two main figures are set off to the left hand side serves to emphasise the informality of the image. The couple are depicted in fashionable dress rather than court regalia and the strength of their loving relationship is commemorated through their intimate pose - they are shown holding hands - while a winged cherub showers flowers upon them. (Read more.)

 

More HERE.

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Laundering Our Tax Dollars

 From Tierney's Real News:

Mike Benz, John Solomon, Marco Rubio, and RFK Jr. have all given recent interviews about how Team Obama and the Deep State used USAID to launder our money all over the world and then back to America to take out President Trump.

They are all saying the same thing in different ways. The left-wing Deep State has been doing this for decades and laundered TRILLIONS of taxpayer dollars for Globalist (Communist) operations that are designed to destroy us. That’s how you know it’s all true!

Mike Benz was a speech writer for Ben Carson and Stephen Miller, a leader in the US State Department under President Trump's first term and hired by Marco Rubio to dismantle and restructure USAID in Trump's second term.

Mike Benz said that Barack Obama was using USAID to pretend to send money to a country for “aid” and instead laundering it to the Cayman Islands. He would then use that money to fund and train “Rent-a-Riots” for protests to overthrow governments, including ours.

Sound familiar? (Read more.)

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‘Phossy Jaw’

 From All That's Interesting:

Matchmaking was a common trade across early 19th-century England and America, and matchmakers worked tirelessly to find new innovations in match technology. Enter: white phosphorous. Though notoriously toxic, the chemical could be rendered into a paste that could be lit on any surface with just a bit of friction. These so-called “strike-anywhere” matches, also known as lucifer matches, became incredibly popular — and the industry to create them became equally profitable. Although factory owners knew that prolonged exposure to white phosphorous could cause the necrosis of the human jaw, they continued to use it anyway — and employed young women and girls in their factories for 10 to 15-hour days. (Read more.)

 

From Grunge:

 For the whole story of the matchstick women, there's a little bit of background that's needed first — especially considering that today, it's nothing to strike a match (or flick a lighter) and make fire happen. It wasn't always that easy, though. For centuries, making fire was a pretty labor-intensive endeavor that, according to the Pitt Rivers Museum, required the use of flint and tinder. The idea of using a chemical reaction to kick-start a fire only really came about in the 17th century, and it wasn't until 1827 that John Walker accidentally invented something much, much better.

Walker had originally intended to become a surgeon, but it wasn't long into his study that he decided he wanted a life with considerably less blood in it. After opening his own chemist's shop in Stockton-on-Tees, he quickly realized that his background in chemistry and botanical studies gave him something of a unique perspective on things. In addition to making his own medicines (they were definitely different times), he also spent some of his spare time conducting various scientific experiments.

The breakthrough came when he was trying to develop a combustible paste. It would have been a big deal for the military, but when he scraped the stick he'd been using to stir his experimental paste with along his mantelpiece, he invented something that had a much wider appeal: the match. (Read more.)

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"Most Mournful and Moving"

From Ancient Origins:

The Lion of Lucerne (known also as the Lion Monument) is a memorial located in Lucerne, Switzerland. This monument is a rock relief carved into the cliff face of a former sandstone quarry, and features a dying lion. Sculpted during the early part of the 19th century, the purpose of the Lion of Lucerne was to commemorate the Swiss Guards who lost their lives in 1792 during the French Revolution.  

The Lion of Lucerne was designed by Bertel Thorvaldsen, a famous Danish sculptor who lived between the 18th and 19th centuries. The man who was responsible for the actual carving of the monument, however, was a stonemason from Constance (in southern Germany) by the name of Lucas Ahorn. The memorial was designed by Thorvaldsen in 1819 whilst he was staying in Rome, and work began in the following year by Ahorn. The monument, which measures 10 meters (32.8 ft.) in length and 6 meters (19.7 ft.) in height, was completed in 1821. (Read more.)

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Ferguson at Twelve: The Lie That Divided a Nation

 From Man of Steele:

Ferguson is often thought of as an isolated event, something that happened way back when. I recently had to explain what happened in Ferguson to several eighteen year olds who had never heard of the shooting, because they were six years old when it happened. But Ferguson is not an isolated event. In many ways, it is the beginning, or the key escalation, in the long running culture war that is now sixty years old, and its repercussions are felt to this day. Would the stunning response sanitizing the Hamas of October 7 as freedom fighters have been possible without how Ferguson changed the landscape? Likely not. Or it wouldn’t have been as successful. Ferguson was the launch of Black Lives Matter, the elevation of liberation ideology and the red-green axis that rolls stronger today than ever. And it all began on Canfield Drive with the dead body of Michael Brown lying on that scorching pavement that August afternoon and this weekend is the twelfth anniversary.

On August 9, 2014, Michael Brown was eighteen years old when he was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson. Within hours of the shooting, Dorian Johnson, who had been with Brown prior to the shooting, told the world that Brown had his hands up in the air and said, don’t shoot. The “Hands up, don’t shoot” slogan spread across the world like wildfire as the Twitter hashtag maps documented. Al Sharpton yelled the slogan and that a surrendering black teenager had been shot by a white cop. Black shot by white. Black white. And it traveled from Canfield Drive to the Congress to the NFL to corporations and to campuses across America. It became, to use my father’s phrase, a poetic truth, the kind of lie that a nation believes not because the evidence supports it but because it confirms what many Americans suspected of their nation. (Read more.)

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When Everything Is Fascism, Nothing Is

 From Unlicensed Punditry:

If I hear that America is sliding into fascism one more time, I’m going to puke.

Maybe I’m just hopelessly old-fashioned, but I still believe words are supposed to mean things. Fascism is a real thing. It has a history, an ideology, identifiable characteristics and some exceptionally ugly examples from the twentieth century. It does not simply mean that the president said something obnoxious, enforced a law you dislike, criticized a newspaper, deported someone, imposed a tariff, fired a bureaucrat or exercised an executive power differently than the last guy did.

Yet here we are.

“Fascism” has become less a political classification than a particularly nasty synonym for “authoritarian,” and authoritarian increasingly means “someone on the other political team using government power in a way I don’t like.”

When everything is fascism, nothing is.

That is not an argument that fascism is meaningless. Quite the opposite. It is an argument that a useful word has been abused to the point that its use in contemporary American politics often tells us more about the person saying it than the person being described. (Read more.)

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