Lady Day

 

 From A Clerk of Oxford:

Today is the feast of the Annunciation, 'Lady Day'. As I explored last year, the medieval church considered 25 March to be the single most important date in history, at once the beginning and the end of Christ's life on earth: it was the date of the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the eighth day of Creation, the crossing of the Red Sea, and the sacrifice of Isaac, all profoundly meaningful events in the carefully-crafted divine story of salvation history. Its resonances reached even unto Middle Earth, as Tolkien aligned the downfall of the Ring to this most auspicious of dates. (Read more.)

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Iran's Qatar Strike Exposed China's Secret Industrial Vulnerability

 From Amuse on X:

This is the counter-intuitive turn in the argument, so it is worth pausing to set it up carefully. China produces only about 3 million cubic meters of helium per year, roughly 1.6% of world production, despite having the largest semiconductor manufacturing ambition outside of Taiwan. China’s domestic helium supply is negligible relative to its industrial appetite. For years, China closed this gap primarily through long-term supply contracts with the two largest producers, the US and Qatar. Those contracts gave Chinese fabs, research institutions, and aerospace programs a reliable pipeline of one of the most irreplaceable industrial inputs on earth, and they did so at prices that reflected relatively stable long-term supply arrangements rather than emergency spot procurement. Iran’s strikes effectively severed one of those two pipelines at the source. The Qatari helium that was contracted to flow to Chinese buyers cannot flow if the facilities that produce it are not operating. Force majeure provisions will be invoked. Allocations will be cut. And because the helium market allocates under scarcity by priority, with medical imaging and aerospace applications receiving near-full coverage and lower-priority industrial uses taking the deepest cuts, Chinese semiconductor manufacturing, which sits in the middle tier of that allocation hierarchy, is precisely where the pain is likely to concentrate. (Read more.)

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A Celebration of Motherhood

From Word on Fire:

The trajectory of influencer culture on the small scale that I witnessed with Catholic women looked something like this: First you share your foliage photos with a dress that you have a coupon code for, and then you’re sharing deeply personal information about your family drama (with a link to the lipstick in bio), and when you’ve run out of ways to monetize your story, you peter out a bit. Maybe you begin to work outside of the home or your children age out of wanting to wear matching neutral linen outfits for your photo shoot (ahem, yes, mine have) or your lifestyled home no longer looks photographable, and that is more than okay. Maybe you are writing in a spiral-bound journal with an ink pen to process your own story instead of reaching for the calming, numbing effect of punching it out in a caption and watching the likes and comments flow in. I am speaking truly and firstly about myself here.

Many Catholic women online with audiences of a variety of sizes are demonstrating setting healthy boundaries with their online presence or simply moving off of it altogether. They’re weary of being told how to think, dress, feel, be as a wife, be as a friend, and that if they only buy this course, then they’d know how to be as a daughter of God too. They’re weary of being the content producers packaging up these instructions. They’d like to connect with real, awkward friends in person where one person interrupts the other and the other’s child shouts, “I have a butt!” at their child, and then they all get to practice working through being real people in a real world and all that the incarnation entails. And this means we have a chance at growing into a culture transformed by Christ. The screen is a starting point, but we must jump off to evangelize face-to-face, heart-to-heart, friend-to-friend. Otherwise we live in a fishbowl of one-way mirrors, and nothing is less interesting than the narcissistic navel-gazing promoted by the dopamine hamster wheel that is social media. (Read more.)

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The Buried City – Unearthing the Real Pompeii

  

From Reid's Reader:

Zuchtriegel makes it clear that Romans followed and copied Greek art. In fact at one point he notes that Pompeii did not ever have the best art work. He says that ancient Rome, Capua and Verona had more great art works than Pompeii ever had, and they had larger arenas.  He spends some time examining the famous copy of the statue of the Greek god Apollo and its connection with Greek culture. Sensuality and eroticism were displayed in some of the houses of the rich. Zuchtriegel spends some time with freaks and hermaphrodites as they were depicted in Greek tales. Wealthy people’s walls were painted with images of Greek fables and the doings of the Greek gods, sometimes dealing with rape or violence but just as often dealing with images of serenity or weddings. One house, excavated in the early years of archaeologism [in the late 19^th century] was named as the House of the Vetti, generally interpreted as a brothel. Wealthy people also had slaves, and the prostitutes were slaves. Slaves could be freed sometimes, but often this would simply mean that an old slave was of no worth anymore and the freed slave was left in poverty and would have nowhere to go.

Having explained all of this, Zuchtriegel notes that in the last years of Pompeii there was a god that was very popular. This was the Greek Dionysus. But he also notes that the very ground Pompeii was built on was originally Etruscan land, and the Etruscan gods were related to nature and agriculture. There were many rituals that had been carried through to the late years of Pompeii. He then returns to the state of the city as it now is. Among other things, some of the ruins were destroyed during the Second World War due to American bombing near to Naples. For a long time there were misunderstandings about the meanings of some buildings that had been buried in the 79 A.D. earthquake. For example, one building that was dug up by amateur archaeologists in the early 20^th century, became known as the Villa of Mysteries because it looked dark and there was a long frieze whose meaning was difficult to understand. Could it have been the site of a forbidden cult? But it is now understood that there was no mystery at all. The villa, as it originally stood, was open to the passing public, there were no orgies taking place in it, and the images on the wall had to do with celebrations of a wedding.

It is in the last parts of The Buried City that Gabriel Zuchtriegel goes back to what actually happened when Pompeii was almost obliterated. He likes to show how ordinary people – not just the rich – were going through the streets of the city just before the sky fell in. One example was a chariot that has only recently been dug up by modern archaeologists. Only parts of it survived, but it was clearly being driven on its way to some ordinary event.  Zuchtriegel also often reminds us that those who lived in the most horribly cramped quarters were the poor people – who made up most of the population – and the slaves. As he sees it, the most important people in Pompeii were the poor and the slaves who kept the city running. They were the ones who drove carts bringing into the city the food that came from the fields and the fishing boats, cooked and produced meals, looked after the children of rich etc. Yet they had to live in the worst houses.

Regrettably, says Zuchtriegel, despite all the help of the police, there is still in Naples the Camorra – the Neapolitan version of the Sicilian Mafia -  which illegitimately raids parts of Pompeii, stealing antiquities and selling them to the rich in the black market. But things are now being tightened. There is the frequently-asked question “How many people lived in Pompeii at the time it was destroyed?” Answers range from 40,000 to 20,000, but one also has to be aware of the fact that the rural areas, which brought in grain, stock and milk, should also be seen as part of Pompeii. At an odd point, too,  Zuchtriegel says that Pompeii was probably economically declining in the years before its ruin. Apparently more local farmers now raised grapes as wine became most important… but this meant that grain had to be imported from different countries – like Egypt  - at great price.  (Read more.)

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Blood and Progress: New Book Reveals the Left’s History of Violence

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Blood and Progress is a corrective to the censored history of the left’s political violence in America, going back at least a century. I’ve obtained an early copy, and Blood and Progress is must-reading.

    Here is the thesis as laid out by Rothman: “It is necessary to bring a gratuitous amount of evidence to bear in support of the observable fact that the American left—too often, fringe and mainstream alike—either refuse to confront or are disconcertingly comfortable with a certain level of domestic political violence. Indeed, its members will heartily protest the allegation that there is a rising tide of left-wing violence to speak of. They are inclined to ignore it, excuse it, explain it away, or marshal their own evidence in support of their belief that the American right is the font from which all political violence springs.”

    Rothman emphasizes that he is not dismissing right-wing violence, only arguing that the media, academia, and politicians explain away the violence on their own side while trumpeting the problem on the right. Liberals will talk about January 6th for decades while watching their own cities burn to the ground or their children get assaulted by illegal immigrants.

    In 1995, community activist Barack Obama launched his first run for the Illinois state Senate at the house of Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn. In 1970, Ayers and Dohrn were indicted for inciting a riot and conspiracy to bomb government buildings. Dohrn was convicted; Ayers was not. Ayers is not sorry, telling The New York Times in 2001, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Ayers and his fellow terrorists bombed the Pentagon as part of their anti-war activities. As journalist Bernie Quigley once put it, “Maybe we should begin to ask ourselves where we are going in our world today when a right-wing terrorist, resolute in his conviction to the very last, like Ayers, gets a quick and short ride to the death chamber and a shallow and forgotten grave, while bombers from the ’60s get tantalizing offers from Harvard, $100 million grants from Ambassador Walter Annenberg and dinner with [celebrity academic professors].” (Read more.)

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The ‘Polar Unity’ of the Two Forms of the Roman Rite

 From The Catholic Thing:

The motu proprio Summorum Pontificum (2007) of Pope Benedict XVI introduced into the contemporary ecclesial vocabulary a distinction that has since become both fruitful and contentious: the “Ordinary Form” and the “Extraordinary Form” of the one Roman Rite. Benedict was at pains to insist that these are not two rites but two usages of the same lex orandi. The Missal promulgated by Pope Paul VI after the Second Vatican Council constitutes the Ordinary Form; the Missal of Pope John XXIII (1962), standing in organic continuity with the Tridentine codification of Pope Pius V, may be celebrated as the Extraordinary Form.

Benedict’s claim was juridical and pastoral, but its deeper import is theological. The coexistence of the two forms within one rite can be understood as a “polar unity” in the sense articulated by Hans Urs von Balthasar: a living tension of complementary principles whose unity is not the flattening of difference but its orchestration.

Benedict himself rejected the hermeneutic of rupture that would pit preconciliar and postconciliar liturgy against one another. In his famous 2005 address to the Roman Curia, he contrasted a “hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture” with a “hermeneutic of reform in continuity.”

The liturgy, precisely because it is the Church’s most public act of faith, must embody this continuity in a way that is not merely conceptual but sacramental. The two forms of the Roman Rite thus stand as a visible sign that tradition is not a museum piece nor a revolutionary program, but a living stream whose depth and breadth can be perceived only by holding together its historical strata.

To interpret this polarity in a richer theological key, it is helpful to turn to Balthasar’s account of the Marian and Petrine dimensions of the Church. For Balthasar, the Church is first Marian before she is Petrine. Mary, in her fiat and her immaculate receptivity, embodies the Church’s contemplative, bridal, and receptive essence. Peter, in his confession and commission, embodies the Church’s apostolic, juridical, and governing mission.

These two dimensions are inseparable; yet they are not identical. The Marian dimension grounds the Petrine; the Petrine serves the Marian. The Church is not an institution that happens to have a mystical interior; she is a mystery that necessarily assumes institutional form. (Read more.)

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Royal Escape from Falmouth

Henrietta Maria by Van Dyck

As a dynasty the Royal Stuarts are known for harrowing escapes, with the family of Charles I and Henrietta Maria having more than their share. As I discovered as I wrote the second novel of the Henrietta of France trilogy, the Queen, on more than one occasion, found herself fleeing for her life. From The National Maritime Museum:

The Queen who had been suffering with pains in her limbs throughout the previous winter was now extremely ill which prompted the King to beg his elderly physican ‘Mayerne, for the love of me, go to my wife’, to attend her in Exeter.² Help was sent also from the Queen’s sister in law the Queen Regent in France and it is probable there were negotiations underway at this time for Henrietta Maria’s eventual flight to France. The Queen gave birth to a healthy baby on 16 June but her symptoms persisted causing serious concern for her life. With the Parliamentary forces advancing on Exeter, just a fortnight after giving birth and still suffering severe ill health, Henrietta Maria set out for Cornwall. Her newly born daughter had been left behind in Exeter probably considered as being too frail for the journey and entrusted by the Queen to the care of her lady in waiting and friend Anne Villiers, Lady Dalkeith.³

The Queen’s party were making for Falmouth.  ‘The Queen is this day gone towards Falmouth, intending to embark herself for France’  her secretary Henry Jermyn had written to George Digby on 30 June.⁴ Cornwall was in royalist hands and Falmouth was one of the most valuable royalist ports supplying arms and munitions for the cause and allowing trade and passage to and from the continent. It had the important anchorage of the Carrick Roads in the deep estuary at the mouth of the river Fal and was protected by the garrisons of Pendennis and St Mawes castles. The castles had been built in the reign of Henry VIII as artillery forts to protect the Carrick Roads. Pendennis, the larger of the two, on its rocky headland with an elevated position overlooking Falmouth was perfect for defence both from the land and the sea and the manor of Arwenack, seat of the Royalist Killigrew family, was nearby. Falmouth offered an ideal point of departure for the Queen’s escape. (Read more.)

 

Volume 1 of the Henrietta of France trilogy is available HERE. Volume 2 is HERE.

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Dirty Cops: Mueller, Comey, and Weissmann

 From Tierney's Real News:

For years, I trusted the FBI and DOJ to be impartial guardians of justice. Then came the Trump–Russia hoax—a three‑year circus of leaks, indictments, and process crimes that never proved the core allegation of collusion.

Digging through thousands of pages of research over the past several years opened my eyes: Robert Mueller, James Comey, and their top lieutenant Andrew Weissmann perfected what it means to be a dirty cop over decades. This article reflects my interpretation of publicly available information and court documents. This is long and complicated but necessary reading if you want to understand the total picture.

They ruined lives through withheld evidence and “gotcha” charges while shielding their own circle. Here’s their story in chronological order, straight from the file’s documented cases.

Early Roots: Mueller’s Boston Cover-Up (1980s)

People say Mueller served his country, so we should trust him implicitly. His career says otherwise.

Mueller’s career kicked off as acting U.S. Attorney in Boston during the 1980s, where he directly oversaw the FBI’s catastrophic handling of mobster Whitey Bulger. FBI handler John Connolly actively protected Bulger while the gangster committed at least 19 murders, yet Connolly coerced innocent men like Joseph Salvati into prison on fabricated testimony from turncoats.

Two of those framed men died behind bars before their names were cleared. Courts later determined the FBI had deliberately buried exculpatory evidence, leading to over $100 million in taxpayer-funded settlements for the victims’ families. Critics argue Mueller’s office either ignored these red flags or actively enabled the corruption, establishing an early pattern: protect powerful insiders like Bulger, frame expendable outsiders, and pay no personal or institutional price for the scandal.

Bulger was later killed in prison under mysterious circumstances—some observers have speculated it happened just as he was poised to talk about his past FBI dealings. Coincidence? You decide.

Mueller was nominated by President George W. Bush on July 5, 2001, confirmed unanimously by the Senate (98-0) on August 2, 2001, and officially sworn in as FBI Director on September 4, 2001—just one week before the 9/11 attacks.

This timing often gets highlighted in critiques of his tenure, as he immediately oversaw the post-9/11 FBI transformation amid massive scrutiny. (Read more.)

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Conservatives Have Failed at Culture

 Well, at least one of my books has been made into a film. I never received a cent, however. From Splice Today:

Over the last century, beginning with movies, jazz and literature, liberals have been the great artistic visionaries. They defended James Joyce. They founded magazines like Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. Orson Welles put on groundbreaking plays in the 1930s and directed Citizen Kane. The Beatles worked all-nighters in Hamburg. Jann Wenner turned a $7500 loan into Rolling Stone magazine. And Lena Dunham was 24 when she wrote and directed Tiny Furniture. Go ahead and hate her and the film. Then shut up and make a better one.

Wealthy people like Ben Shapiro won’t even fund the arts that could change the culture. Writing for Commentary, social historian Fred Siegel once explored how the American masses embraced the art in the 1950s even as philanthropists and gatekeepers were offering the best of Western culture. Americans at the time, wrote Siegel, “were sampling the greatest works of Western civilization for the first time.” The book Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America revealed that “twenty years ago, you couldn’t sell Beethoven out of New York. Today we sell Palestrina, Monteverdi, Gabrieli, and Renaissance and Baroque music in large quantities.” There was a 250 percent growth in the number of local symphony orchestras between 1940 and 1955.

In 1955, writes Siegel, “15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games. 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million.”

Siegel notes there were gatekeepers to get this great art to the people: “NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million viewers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours.” Siegel observes that “on March 16, 1956, a Sunday chosen at random,” the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times of Toulouse-Lautrec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillich, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew. Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March,” a National Book Award winner, sold a million copies in paperback in the early-1950s.

John F. Kennedy supported the arts. “The life of the arts,” he said, “far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose.” (Read more.)

From The Chivalry Guild:

I often read complaints about the failure of Hollywood to bring the life of Richard the Lionheart or Scanderbeg or Godfrey of Bouillon to the screen in a blockbuster epic.1 It certainly sounds like a grand idea—but always be careful what you wish for. Even if the studios could be trusted to depict the hero as heroic (rather than “problematic,” perverted, or overrated) and show his cause to be just (rather than brutal Christian aggression against noble Muslim victims), little subversions still have a way of creeping into the projects and undermining the whole thing—democratic cliches, enlightened pieties. Then there’s the question of quality. Truly getting Richard right would require a director with elite vision, a screenwriter with a deft touch and knowledge of the past, an actor who could credibly pass as one of the greatest men who ever lived, and more—and the likelihood of all these pieces coming together are increasingly slim. More likely they would just make him a toxic mediocrity and/or a repressed homosexual.

Would you rather have a C- version of the hero or no movie at all?

With every passing year I grow less and less interested in shows and movies. My divorce from Hollywood is certainly made easier as everything on the screen turns embarrassingly shoddy and emotionally manipulative—an inevitable consequence of frenzy for sidelining talented white men in favor of DEI hires. But I’ve come to suspect something larger at work than just declining skill and political machinations. The current embarrassments are likely more of a feature than a bug, the kind of thing that can’t really be solved by simply putting “based” people in charge of the studios.2 (Read more.)

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