An Irish Halloween

The picture above was painted by Irish artist Daniel Maclise in 1833, inspired by a typical Irish Halloween party. (Click on picture for details.) It was called "snap-apple night." Here is the caption which accompanied the painting:

There Peggy was dancing with Dan/While Maureen the lead was melting,/To prove how their fortunes ran/With the Cards ould Nancy dealt in;/There was Kate, and her sweet-heart Will,/In nuts their true-love burning,/And poor Norah, though smiling still/She'd missed the snap-apple turning.

For the ancient Celts, November 1 was Samhain, their New Year's day. It is not necessary to detail some of the more gruesome pagan customs which accompanied the festivities in pre-Christian times, customs which eventually disappeared as the Faith spread and took hold. Nevertheless, on a more positive note, the Celts believed that on the day in question the veil between the worlds grew thin, and one could easily pass from world to world, from time into eternity.

As Christians, in celebrating the Solemnity of All Saints, the sacred liturgy permits us to glimpse the place where the blessed ones dwell in light. We are led to think of all the dead, of the awe-inspiring realties of death, judgment, heaven and hell. On All Souls' Day we recall those who are still undergoing purgation in the realm beyond time. We, too, through the Mass and through prayer, pass from world to world, for all are present to God.

Here is an article (via A Conservative Blog for Peace) which elucidates on the history of All Hallows' Eve, the pagan versus Christian aspects and how the Irish, French, Germans, and English brought it all to North America. To quote:

Halloween can still serve the purpose of reminding us about Hell and how to avoid it. Halloween is also a day to prepare us to remember those who have gone before us in Faith, those already in Heaven and those still suffering in Purgatory. The next time someone claims Halloween is a cruel trick to lure our children into devil worship, I suggest you tell them the real origin of Halloween and let them know about its Catholic roots and significance. (By Fr Scott Archer)

 More on Irish Halloween traditions HERE.

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Iran Tried to Hold the World’s Oil Hostage

 From Tierney's Real News:

The fake news and the political hacks in Washington are running their usual playbook. They are overreacting about short-term gas prices, calling the White House reckless over Iran, and worrying about low oil stocks.

They are missing the bigger picture.

Alexander Muse just wrote a strong summary titled “Trump Was Right to Take On Iran, and Two Years of Refilling Oil Tanks Is a Bargain.” Muse correctly pointed out that what Trump is doing with Iran is justified, well-timed, and a good deal for Americans. This is not only about stopping a dangerous regime. It is Trump making a smart move to keep America strong for the next fifty years.

1. Defeating Iran’s Financial Warfare: Starving the Beast

For years, past presidents and Washington experts tried to “contain” Iran with weak talks or piles of cash. Meanwhile, the Iranian leaders and their military used oil money and blackmail proceeds to fund themselves, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Houthi terrorists. Trump changed the approach.

By fully blocking Iran’s oil, its crude exports have basically stopped. Shipping trackers show almost no Iranian oil leaving through the Strait of Hormuz since September. No successful shipments have gotten through the blockade. CENTCOM says the operation has already blocked about $25 billion in oil revenue for Iran. Cutting off the money does what years of limited fights could not: it starves the regime’s allies and stops it from building missiles and drones that threaten American friends and ships.

Stopping a dangerous regime by cutting its money is just as effective as stopping it in a fight. (Read more.)

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The Masculinity Paradox

 From Unlicensed Punditry:

What follows is opinion and theory, but something that I think worth considering.

Unarguably, there is a peculiar contradiction developing across the Western world, and I have been turning over a theory that may explain at least part of it. For decades, Western feminism has treated traditional masculinity as a problem to be solved. Men were too aggressive, too competitive, too dominant, too protective, too determined to lead. The solution was supposedly to make men less masculine, to dismantle traditional expectations of male authority, and to construct a society in which distinctions between the sexes became increasingly irrelevant. Yet at precisely the moment Western civilization began congratulating itself for taming its men, it also began embracing large-scale migration from societies where traditional male authority remains considerably more pronounced. Perhaps these developments are entirely unrelated. Perhaps not.

The first step in understanding this contradiction is recognizing that equality and sameness are not interchangeable concepts. Men and women possess equal human worth and should enjoy equal protection under the law, but they are not biologically identical, nor are their average dispositions, preferences, and physical capabilities identical. Rather than accepting those differences, progressive ideology increasingly demanded that society compensate for them. Equality of opportunity gave way to equity of outcomes, and equity required intervention. Where men predominated, the presumption increasingly became that something discriminatory had occurred. Masculinity itself became suspect, particularly when expressed through leadership, competition, assertiveness, or the traditional obligation to protect women.

Western men responded in different ways. Some resisted, some adapted, and others simply withdrew. Generations of boys were increasingly taught that the characteristics once associated with responsible manhood were potentially toxic. The ideal man became less assertive, less confrontational, less traditionally masculine, and more deferential to female expectations. Meanwhile, women acquired unprecedented educational, professional, political, and economic influence. None of that necessarily required diminishing men, but influential strands of modern feminism often seemed unable to celebrate female achievement without treating traditional male authority as an obstacle to be overcome. (Read more.)

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Dragons and Other Monsters

 
From Smithsonian:

The dragon resting on its golden hoard. The gallant knight charging to rescue the maiden from the scaly beast. These are images long associated with the European Middle Ages, yet most (all) medieval people went their whole lives without meeting even a single winged, fire-breathing behemoth. Dragons and other monsters, nights dark and full of terror, lurked largely in the domain of stories—tales, filtered through the intervening centuries and our own interests, that remain with us today.

As Halloween approaches, we’re naturally thinking about scary stories. Though horror today is most often about entertainment—the thrill of the jump scare or the suspense of the thriller—it hasn’t always been that way. In the European Middle Ages, monster stories served as religious teaching tools, offering examples of what not to do, manifestations of the threats posed by the supernatural and the diabolical, and metaphors for the evil humans do to one another. (Read more.)

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Four Fake Polling Firms Rigged the 2026 Primaries

 From The Enterprise:

A voter who already suspects the polls are rigged against him will not be surprised by a bogus 22-point deficit. It will discourage him, and a discouraged voter stays home. In a primary, a fake poll ends candidacies, while in a general election it drains turnout from exactly the voters who had learned to distrust the polls in the first place.

Pollster Nate Silver insists the damage was small, and he has a number to back him up. Pulling Wedgewood out of his Michigan average moved El-Sayed’s lead by 0.6 points, from 3.6 to 3.0. The figure is accurate and also beside the point, since the average was never what the forgers were aiming at. The donor was. So was the reporter who asked McMorrow when she planned to drop out.

Deleting a fraudulent poll from an average cannot undo the campaign decisions and public perceptions it helped create. McMorrow cannot un-withdraw. Crowley’s donors cannot get back the week they spent hedging, and no correction on a polling tracker returns the money a Mississippi Democrat raised on a lie. Real money changed hands, real decisions were made, real markets moved, and harm like that is exactly what criminal law exists to address. (Read more.)

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Nostalgia Is the Past Made Powerless

 From The Wardrobe Door:

Any TV show or movie that was remotely popular in previous decades is being rebooted, remade and re-marketed to old and new fans. An IMDb list highlights upcoming sequels, prequels, remakes and spinoffs. It currently sits at 426 projects in some stage of development.

Of the top 10 domestic grossing movies of 2025, four were sequels, two were live-action versions of animated movies, two were adapting some of the most iconic comic book characters of all time, and one was a video game adaptation. Only one was an original movie. Many of the same types of movies are dominating the 2026 box office so far.

Filmmakers and studios assume, most often rightly, that someone who grew up watching a character will pay to see them again, even though significant time has passed and there’s no guarantee it will live up to the previous incarnation.

But why do we buy the tickets? Why are we not clamoring, as we do in most other avenues of life, for something new? Why is nostalgia ruling our entertainment?

It’s the only place we feel it’s safe to allow the past to visit the present. (Read more.)

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Shades of Victorian Fashion: Orange, Pumpkin, and Peach

The Victorians loved vibrant colors. From Mimi Matthews:

Unlike popular autumnal shades, such as golds, browns, and burnished reds, the Victorians generally regarded the color orange with disfavor. Fashion magazines of the day advised against wearing orange dresses, calling the color ugly and claiming that it was unflattering to every complexion. Even worse, as fashion historian C. Willett Cunnington reports, some believed that the color orange implied “a degree of animal passion which the pure ought not to possess.” I had not intended to give orange an article of its own, but it’s Halloween today and I can think of no better occasion to showcase a selection of this much maligned—but nonetheless striking—shade of Victorian fashion. (Read more.)

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No, Europe Did Not Just Tell Its Citizens to Prepare for World War III

 From The Enterprise:

Germany’s 10 days, the scariest number on the list, comes from the federal civil defense concept published in 2016, which also advised 5 days of water. The Bundestag recorded the figure in October, during the Obama administration. Since then, it has been revised to 10 days of food and drink, and it now sits on the Federal Office of Civil Protection website beside a checklist that reads like the back of a Boy Scout handbook.

Sweden has been at this since 1943, when the government mailed every household a booklet called If War Comes. New editions went out in 1952 and 1961, another in 2018, and the latest in November 2024, which tells households to manage for at least a week without electricity, running water, or a working grocery store. The edition now circulating on 𝕏 is titled If Crisis or War Comes, and that title does most of the work for the panic merchants.

The word war is right there on the cover, and the other governments use it too. The EU strategy lists geopolitical crisis among its hazards. The British campaign calls itself practical preparation for disruptions to essential services, and nobody in Whitehall pretends Russia isn’t among the things that could disrupt them. A risk register lists what could happen; treating it as a forecast of what will happen is the error every one of these posts commits. A hospital keeps a plan for a plane crash, and the plan is not evidence that a plane is coming. Sweden printed war on its cover in 1943, 1952, and 1961, and no Soviet division ever landed on Gotland. (Read more.)

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Halloween and Catholicism

May 13, which is the feast of Our Lady, Queen of All Martyrs, was the original All Saints Day. So the origins of All Saints and Halloween had nothing to do with Samhain, as some people seem to think. Later, the Pope changed All Saints from May to November because after the harvest there was more food in Rome to feed the pilgrims. And for other reasons, as told in the article. From uCatholic:

The practice of a festival day to honor the whole communion of Saints, rather than that just a single saint, seems to happen for the first time in the Catholic Church with the consecration of the Pantheon as a public place for the Church’s worship. This happened in the year 609 (or 610) on May 13th. The Pantheon had been originally dedicated for the use of Roman religion as a place where all the gods would be honored. Boniface displaced the images of the gods from their shrines and gave the building over to the Saints of the Church, particularly the Martyrs. This was a kind of “in your face” to pagan culture. Boniface was saying that the old gods had been defeated and were defeated by the faith of the Church’s Martyrs. 

Also, May 13th was a day associated in Roman religion with what was called the festival of the Lemurs or ancestral spirits. It is likely that Boniface’s choice of this day to claim the Pantheon for Christian worship was intentional and it was a way of saying that the Martyrs are the great ancestors of all the baptized and it is their memory and witness that is rightly honored on the day that Romans recalled their ancestors. 

How we get from May 13th to November 1st is interesting. The festival of All Saints seems to emerge from the dedication of another Roman church that was consecrated by Pope Gregory III. The church is named St. Peter and all the Saints. It was a subsequent pope, Gregory IV, who extended the annual festival that commemorates this church dedication to the whole Church as All Saints Day. The extension of festivals specific to the Church of Rome is an part and parcel of how the Catholic Faith becomes the underlying cultural matrix from which a new kind of European civilization would emerge. (Read more.)

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