The Teutonic Knights

 From The Collector:

Also known as the Deutscher Orden and the Brothers of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem, the Teutonic Order was a key player in the medieval expansion in Eastern Europe. During the Baltic Crusades in Prussia, present-day Latvia and Estonia, and Lithuania, the Teutonic Knights virtually wiped out the pagan population living in these areas, replacing the established authorities with a theocratic state. Read on to learn more about the Teutonic Order and its role in the Christianization of Europe’s last strongholds of paganism.

In 1189, the Crusading forces led by Guy of Lusignan were besieging the town of Acre, which was then controlled by Saladin, the sultan of Egypt and Syria. In 1187, Saladin had also conquered the city of Jerusalem, leading to the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Crusader state established by the Crusaders in 1099 after the end of the First Crusade.

When news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Europe, Pope Gregory VIII initiated the Third Crusade to restore the city to Christian control. In 1190, during the siege of Acre, a number of German merchants, mostly from Bremen and Lübeck, decided to form a fraternity to care for the sick. A year later, after the Crusaders managed to capture Acre, the fraternity established its headquarters in a hospital in the town, and it became known as the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem. (Read more.)

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Murder of the Princesse de Lamballe

Among the thousands murdered during the French Revolution, one of the most notorious cases was that of the death of the Princesse de Lamballe, friend of Queen Marie-Antoinette. The fury of the new order of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity vented itself upon her frail form in a manner of extreme violence. This was as strange as it was hideous, because other than being a confidante of the queen's, Madame de Lamballe could be counted among the more liberal, "enlightened" aristocrats, devoted to works of charity and civil improvements.

Contrary to the standard depiction of Lamballe as a lovely but simpering idiot, the princess was intelligent as well as cultured. She was the Grande Maitresse of all the French masonic ladies' lodges, for she saw freemasonry as a tool for creating a better world, as did many of her contemporaries. Her liberal politics were one of the reasons, according to scholar Bernard Fay, that King Louis XVI encouraged his wife towards the Polignacs, and away from Lamballe and her Orleanist salon. Madame de Lamballe discovered before the end that utopian politics that seek to create an earthly paradise inevitably lead to social chaos.

Marie-Therese-Louise de Savoie-Carignan was born in Turin on September 8, 1749. In 1767 she was married to the Prince de Lamballe, son of the Duc de Penthievre, relatives of the French royal family. Her husband died soon afterwards, and the young Marie-Antoinette pitied her and took her sleigh-riding. According to Madame Campan, the queen's chambermaid:

It was at the time of the sleighing-parties that the Queen became intimately acquainted with the Princesse de Lamballe, who made her appearance in them wrapped in fur, with all the brilliancy and freshness of the age of twenty,–the emblem of spring, peeping from under sable and ermine. Her situation, moreover, rendered her peculiarly interesting; married, when she was scarcely past childhood, to a young prince, who ruined himself by the contagious example of the Duc d’Orleans, she had had nothing to do from the time of her arrival in France but to weep. A widow at eighteen, and childless, she lived with the Duc de Penthievre as an adopted daughter. She had the tenderest respect and attachment for that venerable Prince; but the Queen, though doing justice to his virtues, saw that the Duc de Penthievre’s way of life, whether at Paris or at his country-seat, could neither afford his young daughter-in-law the amusements suited to her time of life, nor ensure her in the future an establishment such as she was deprived of by her widowhood.

Marie-Antoinette made Madame de Lamballe, known for her virtue and kindness, the Superintendent of her household, which was controversial at the time since there were other courtiers who felt the position was due to them. The two women became good friends. The queen was always trying to recapture the home she had left in Austria, where she had been inseparable from her older sister Maria Carolina, who had mothered her a great deal. Madame de Lamballe and Madame de Polignac were both roughly the same age as Carolina. However, Lamballe was a bit too intellectual for Antoinette and so the queen, with Louis' approval, eventually became closer to the Polignacs. She always remained friends with Lamballe, however.

When the Revolution erupted in 1789, Madame de Lamballe returned to France from the safety of England in order to be share the troubles of the royal family. She became closer than ever to the king's devout sister, Madame Elisabeth of France, and was horrified at how the masonic principles she had thought to be so constructive had led to such a violent revolution. When the royal family was arrested and sent to the Temple prison in August 1792, Lamballe was separated from them and sent to the prison of La Force. When the September Massacres broke out, in which thousands were killed and the streets ran with blood, Madame de Lamballe was asked to renounce her loyalty to the king and the queen. She refused, and was delivered over to the mob. She was bludgeoned and stabbed to death, and by some accounts raped and mutilated. She was definitely decapitated, and the valet of Louis XVI, Hanet Clery, gave an account of how the mob brought her head on a pike to the Temple prison for the queen to kiss.

We were hardly seated before a head at the end of a pike was presented at the window. Tison's wife screamed loudly; the murderers thought it was the queen's voice, and we heard the frantic laughs of those barbarians. Thinking that Her Majesty was still at table, they had raised the victim's head so that it could not escape her sight; it was that of the Princesse de Lamballe. Though bloody, it was not disfigured; her blond hair, still curling, floated around the pike.

Such excesses became typical of the French Revolution, stirred up by propaganda which played upon the fears of many. The Princesse de Lamballe was a bit misguided but ultimately heroic and loyal, and the grisly death to which she was subjected exemplified not only the misogyny of the new order but a hatred of all that was beautiful and good.

 

 

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The Canary is Singing

 From The Enterprise:

Virginia now hosts roughly 385 operating data center buildings, totaling on the order of 75 million gross square feet. Measured by square footage, that is about 5 times what Texas has, roughly 7 times California, roughly 7 times New York, and roughly 10 times Florida. Adjusted for population, the gap widens. Virginia has nearly 5 times as many data centers per resident as Texas, 6.2 times as many as California, 5.9 times as many as New York, and 8.5 times as many as Florida. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in America and the largest in the world, and Loudoun, Prince William, and Fairfax counties alone account for roughly 80% of the Commonwealth’s inventory. Other states are still arguing from models of what might happen if a campus were to arrive. Virginia already has the record of what did happen after the campuses arrived in force and stayed.

The water claim is the one that travels fastest. Critics say the facilities will drain a community’s supply and then poison what remains with their discharge. A large share of Virginia’s data center buildings do not use meaningful quantities of water after the tanks are filled. About 40% are exclusively air- or dry-cooled, meaning they reject heat mechanically and consume almost no energy once the system is charged. Another 35% are hybrid, running dry through most of the year and switching to evaporative assistance only in the hottest stretches of summer. That leaves roughly 25% that depend on water. The phrase “data centers use water” treats those three machines as a single entity.

Virginia’s fleet consumes about 2.1 billion gallons of water a year, of which roughly 780 million gallons are discharged. The fair test is what the same land and the same 75 million square feet would demand as ordinary offices. Federal Energy Star benchmarking puts median office water use at about 14.48 gallons per square foot per year. Multiply that out, and you get roughly 1.086 billion gallons of annual use and roughly 619 million gallons of annual discharge. The data center stream is larger by volume, somewhere in the range of 16% to 26% depending on which assumptions you carry through the arithmetic. (Read more.)

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‘Desk Revolutionaries’

 From History Today:

The Directory, the regime which ruled France during the closing years of the revolutionary decade, took its name from the five-man executive body that was elected by a two-chamber legislature, according to the Constitution of 1795. It has been disparaged as an uninspiring, corrupt, and chaotic interlude between two far more dramatic periods, that of the Terror, which preceded it, and the Bonapartist dictatorship that followed. In the past, most historians simply ignored it, concluding their accounts of the Revolution in 1794, with the fall of Robespierre, but that is no longer the case. The Directory remained true to the founding principles of 1789, and is now rightly regarded as an integral part of a greater project to replace the ancien régime in France. Although this experiment failed to end the Revolution by restoring political stability as its leaders intended, they made an invaluable contribution to that protracted process. Their achievements have often been credited to Napoleon, who did bring the upheaval to a close, while many of the individuals who served the Directory would continue to do so under his Consulate and Empire.

Biancamaria Fontana has chosen to approach the Directory from a biographical point of view, devoting the substantive chapters of this book to seven of its leaders, six of whom (from a total of 13) held the post of director for varying lengths of time between 1795 and 1799, while the other was a minister of justice. Their appellation as ‘desk revolutionaries’ might have been more convincingly addressed, though the majority of these mostly lesser-known individuals worked diligently to organise a French Republic which had barely survived its unexpected inception in 1792. This perspective offers significant insight into the regime’s operation, as well as the solid, if unspectacular, measures that were adopted under the Directory, most notably in the realms of finance and taxation. Success on the battlefield was also secured with the annexation of additional territory to the Republic, yet continuing warfare was hardly conducive to orderly progress, and deep-rooted political divisions persisted. The recourse to purges of the legislature, in 1797 and 1798, so as to preserve the system only served to demonstrate its fragility.

The personnel examined here were all seasoned national deputies who had voted for Louis XVI’s execution in 1793 and were thus committed to creating a lasting Republic. Three of them, the directors Reubell, Merlin de Douai, and François de Neufchâteau, were lawyers and had acquired considerable experience of office-holding before the Revolution. The task of legal codification progressed, government finances were much improved, and the bureaucracy was streamlined. Another director, Carnot, an army engineer, pursued the task of military reform by integrating conscripts into the regular army, while the dissolute ex-noble Barras, whose personal conduct gave the Directory such a poor reputation, alone served in the post from beginning to end, when he colluded in its downfall in Brumaire (November 1799). This famous coup d’état was orchestrated by his short-lived fellow director, the abbé Sieyès, who, having played a major role in the events of 1789, now joined the executive with the aim of extending its powers. This could only be done by overthrowing the regime. Outmanoeuvred by Bonaparte, who supplied military support for the coup, Sieyès would collaborate with the subsequent Napoleonic regime, to which Merlin de Douai and Cambacérès in particular made outstanding contributions. (Read more.)

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The Art of Pilgrimage

 

September is the month of Our Lady of Sorrows. From The Way of Beauty:

Pope Benedict XVI, in The Spirit of the Liturgy, identified three authentic traditions of Christian liturgical art: the iconographic, the Gothic, and the Baroque. Each is a legitimate expression of the Christian understanding of the human person and our relationship to God, and each communicates that understanding through a distinct visual language, thereby promoting prayer and worship among the faithful. The iconographic tradition, which dominated Christian art in both East and West until the 12th century, portrays man as he will be in heaven: transfigured, luminous, outside ordinary space and time. The Baroque, which developed in the 17th century, portrays fallen historical man in this life, in the full drama of suffering and grace. The Gothic stands between them, and it is the art most characteristic of the high medieval period in the West.

The Gothic is an authentic and distinct style of liturgical art that developed organically in the West from the iconographic prototype. As the change was gradual, any attempt to date its beginning involves some arbitrary choice. Most commentators settle on the mid-12th century, coinciding broadly with the completion of what is generally considered the first Gothic church, the Abbey of St Denis in Paris, in 1144. The name ‘Gothic’ was coined by High Renaissance commentators as a term of contempt. They held it to be a barbaric style belonging to the period of cultural decline that they believed had begun when the Goths overran the Roman Empire in the West a thousand years earlier. Historians today do not generally share that view of cultural decline, but the name stuck. Even those of us who admire Gothic culture and art continue to use it!

The impetus for the departure from the iconographic prototype stemmed from an increased emphasis on the reliability of human experience and the value of information received through the senses. This led to a greater curiosity about and appreciation of the natural world. Such appreciation was not new: Christians had always relied on sensory information and valued the beauty of the cosmos. What was different was the degree of weight now placed upon them.

Tied to this was the conviction that our world, though fallen and imperfect, is nevertheless good, ordered, and beautiful. There may be evil and suffering in the world, and it may not be as good and beautiful as it ought to be, but it remains God’s creation. This appreciation of the natural world and confidence in our ability to know it through the senses sparked curiosity and a desire to observe it more closely. One effect was the rise of scientific inquiry; another, the one that concerns us here, was an increased naturalism in art, a greater correspondence to natural appearances. The devotion to rational inquiry bound up with this cultural movement also led to a new approach to learning and to the establishment of the great universities, among them those of Paris and Oxford. (Read more.)

 

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Knife Wielding Woman In NYC

Another weird case. From The Truth Barrier:

 The official story:

A 49 year old woman named Pamela Cisneros with a documented history of “Bi-polar” disorder stabbed the 32 year old Vice President of Bank Of America to death in Times Square, N.Y.C., and shortly thereafter stabbed another man, a tourist from Rhode Island, who survived. She is seen on a video waving two small knives at a circle of cops. She lunges at them, is shot, and killed.

Video here.

[Warning: Video depicts shooting of the woman.]

I watched the video and wondered why they didn’t demand she drop the knives, or taser her. I also wondered why there as no blood on her, on the knives, or on the ground. The bullet is seen falling out of her stomach as they turn her over and handcuff her. Also, why is that photographer there with a professional camera, shooting photos?

Many in media are posting this video of the same person, same clothes, dancing creepily with knives (much larger knives) in the exact manner that Britney Spears always does. It is apparently AI. (Read more.)

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A Monastery to ‘Last a Thousand Years’

 From NCR:

A community of Discalced Carmelite sisters is using centuries-old methods to build a monastery in hopes that it will serve as “a beacon of light” for generations to come in Fairfield, Pennsylvania. When the sisters of the Carmel of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph realized they had outgrown their 1940s monastery in the Diocese of Harrisburg, they knew they wanted to build their next home “in a way that is designed to last,” that would speak to St. Teresa of Ávila’s vision for their charism, Catherine Bauer, the director of marketing and development for the sisters, told EWTN News. “And by that, they mean last a thousand years.”

Bucking modern architecture and building conventions, the Fairfield sisters have opted to build their monastery using old-world methods including traditional stonemasonry and timber framing. While the scale of the monastery “will be on the smaller side,” according to Bauer, “it’s more about the stonework, the authenticity of building from the ground up using no nails, no glue, [and] no electricity running through it.” (Read more.)

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The Forgotten Prince of Versailles, Part II

 

From Philip Diaz-Lewis at Rationis Fines:

In 1763, two years before his death, Louis-Ferdinand helped make a book for lay people, to help them fit devotion around their duties according to their state’. The translation of the Psalms was taken from Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, while the Dauphin added his own composed meditations (or hymnes). The work was published by the Cardinal de Luynes, as Office divin abrégé pour tous les temps à l’usage des personnes pieuses.2 As the opening quote should show, the meditations could be quite weighty given the stated intention of the book. It is noteworthy that a prince would care so much to insert such passages into something whose stated aim is speed.

In part one, I introduced the obscure figure of Louis-Ferdinand, son of Louis XV, father of Louis XVI, and Dauphin of France until his premature death in 1765. Using the standard modern scholarly study on his life, La vertu et le secret by Bernard Hours (2006),3 he emerged as a devout, conservative, and anti-radical figure, yet not a mindless zealot. He was widely-read, well-educated, and a writer of maxims and reflections in the ancient Stoic style. Now I turn to the question: was he not merely a thinker, but a coherent one?

Hours flags that quite a number of the sayings recorded by the Dauphin’s posthumous biographers contain commonplaces typical of hagiographical writing.4 This does not by itself invalidate them, for a Christian prince could well have thought in these stock ideas gotten from devout literature. But it does make them less secure as primary sources, since his biographers may have shaped or embellished what they remembered, perhaps without meaning to. Thus, in what follows I will focus only on those maxims and sayings that Hours thinks most likely came from the man himself. (Read more.)

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The First Amendment Protects Your Speech, Not an Islamic Activist's F-1 Student Visa

 From The Enterprise:

Last week, Judge Noël Wise of the Northern District of California entered judgment in Stanford Daily Publishing Corp. v. Rubio. The plaintiffs were the university’s student newspaper and a Jane Doe holding an F-1 visa. The opinion runs some 90 pages and collapses two legal statuses that the Constitution and the Immigration and Nationality Act keep apart. An American citizen and a foreign student may stand at the same rally and chant the same slogans for Hamas, the same organization that murdered, raped, and kidnapped Israeli civilians on October 7. The First Amendment forbids the government from jailing, fining, or prosecuting either of them for those words alone. That protection is real. It is also not the question this case decides.

The question is whether a foreign student, admitted for a limited purpose on conditions attached by Congress, may retain the invitation after the Secretary of State concludes that his presence carries potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. Judge Wise held, in effect, that once the guest begins speaking, the invitation hardens into something the Secretary cannot touch. She treated a permission as if it were a right. The citizen holds this country the way an owner holds a house. The visa student is a guest. Nothing in the First Amendment converts the second position into the first.

Section 221(i) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, codified at 8 USC 1201(i), is written for guests. After a visa is issued, the Secretary of State “may at any time, in his discretion, revoke” it. The power does not expire when the student clears customs. The judgment belongs to the Secretary, not to a jury, a prosecutor, or a district judge in San Jose. A companion provision, 8 USC 1227(a)(4)(C), makes an alien deportable when the Secretary has reasonable ground to believe that his presence or activities would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences. Congress then added the sentence that should have stopped this lawsuit at the courthouse door. There shall be no means of judicial review of a 221(i) revocation, except in the narrow case where the revocation is the sole ground for removal. Congress knows how to open the courthouse. It does so constantly. Here it closed the door on purpose, because visa decisions sit where foreign policy, intelligence, and diplomacy meet, and because courts have the least competence in that arena. (Read more.)

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