The queen is very kind to me just now; we are going together to Saint-Cyr, which she calls my cradle. She calls Montreuil my little Trianon. I have been to hers the last few days with her, without any consequences, and there was no attention she did not show me. She prepared for me one of those surprises in which she excels; but what we did most was to weep over the death of my poor little niece [Madame Sophie.]
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| The Empty Cradle |
From AMAC:
ShareAmerica’s most radical left-wing movement is no longer content to protest from outside; it is now working to dismantle the republic from within. It would be a grave error to dismiss members of the Democratic Socialists of America as mere campus radicals or online agitators. In New York City and beyond, the group and its allies have scored primary victories, toppling incumbents and capturing nominations. The DSA wants power, and it is learning how to seize it.
That is why its agenda demands scrutiny.
In June, as City Journal reported, DSA national leadership adopted a revamped platform titled “Workers Deserve More!” The innocuous name belies a radical program to upend America’s constitutional order.
The document calls for scrapping the U.S. Senate, replacing the president and Supreme Court with bodies chosen by and subordinate to Congress, drafting a new constitution, and creating a “democratic socialist republic.” It goes far beyond higher taxes or regulation: it seeks to abolish the separation of powers crafted by the Founders.
The DSA is not demanding different policies. It is demanding a different country. (Read more.)
From Galerie:
When Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al Thani sold off the Hotel Lambert in Paris and its extraordinary contents in 2022, the depth and extent of his collecting became a thing of legend. A soup tureen gifted to Catherine the Great by Count Orloff; a gilded candelabra commissioned by Marie Antoinette; a hand-painted screen of the Bay of Naples that had belonged to Coco Chanel… it took five distinctive lots to deliver this unparalleled treasure trove of decorative arts to the market. The sale made $76.56 million, and the house—an early baroque palace by architect Louis Le Vau with interiors by Charles le Brun and Eustache Le Sueur—sold for $226 million to the French businessman and art collector Xavier Niel. Actually not bad for a mini-Versailles: the same design team went on to make the most famous palace in the world.
But Sheikh Hamad, a key member of the Qatari royal family who is now in his mid-40s, has not stopped collecting. Since 2021, carefully curated exhibitions at the Hôtel de la Marine in Paris have shown highlights from The Al Thani Collection, which now contains over 5,000 works of art, including very contemporary paintings by artists including Issy Wood and Adrian Ghenie. The latest exhibition, called “Animalia,” offers a look at man’s relationship to animals through the medium of finely crafted objects, from Neolithic times to 1900.
“Sheik Hamad has the mind and the eyes of a falcon,” Giambatista Valli, the couturier who is a friend of the prince, told me at the time of the Hotel Lambert sale. “He is passionate about beauty first and foremost. He is driven by a curiosity which is backed up by incredible knowledge.” (Read more.)
From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:
ShareIt might seem surprising that this fresco of Christ Pantocrator, discovered in the apse of a small obscure church in the north of Italy, is so unusual that it caused a major re-write of the art-history timeline. It looks like any early Byzantine image that we’ve seen hundreds of times: serene, otherworldly, with the face symmetrical with classical proportions, modelled with lights and darks to give the impression of lifelike three-dimensionality. But at the same time, we can see it is stylistically different: the softness of the facial modelling, the natural fall of the hair, the subtly rendered shadow beneath the chin, the piercing gaze and human expression.
In fact, it immediately reminds me in its naturalism of the frescos discovered at Pompei and Herculaneum. It might not be surprising to find that it dates to the earliest paleo-Christian period, when Roman standards were still in use.
But that would be the wrong guess.
In today’s post for all subscribers, we will explore the treasure left forgotten in a tiny church in the forests of Lombardy. Hidden for centuries beneath layers of plaster, the exceptionally beautiful and lively Byzantine frescoes of Castelseprio challenge everything scholars thought they knew about Western art of the early middle ages - the time of the Lombard Kingdom, Carolingian and Ottonian empires.
Were they painted by a wandering Byzantine master, or do they reveal a local tradition that quietly preserved the grace and theology of late antique sacred art? (Read more.)
From The Daily BS:
ShareThe Court ruled against Trump’s executive order that sought to limit automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to illegal immigrants and certain temporary visa holders. The majority concluded that the order could not stand, preserving the long-standing interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
That headline generated predictable celebration from immigration activists and predictable frustration from conservatives. Yet the more interesting story may be found in the concurring opinion written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh agreed that Trump could not simply rewrite existing law through executive action. At the same time, he suggested Congress could potentially revisit the issue legislatively.
“Congress could — consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment — amend” existing citizenship statutes or “otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country,” Kavanaugh wrote, according to reports summarizing the opinion.
That single paragraph immediately electrified Republicans who have long argued that modern immigration realities bear little resemblance to the circumstances lawmakers faced when the 14th Amendment was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War. (Read more.)
From The New Criterion:
ShareThe third-oldest college in the United States is small and, to borrow a word from the headline of a recent positive article about it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “weird.” Founded in 1696 as King William’s School, St. John’s College in Annapolis has since 1937 provided its undergraduates, all of whom study Ancient Greek and are working toward a BA in liberal arts, with a University of Chicago–inspired curriculum in the great books that eschews nearly all secondary material. My mother-in-law went there, and two of my most talented former students are “tutors,” as the members of the faculty who teach small groups of self-motivated “Johnnies” are referred to locally.
Great books programs are a North American, and largely American, phenomenon. And there is—or, rather, has been—nothing like St. John’s outside the United States. What is surprising, in view of the Eurocentric nature of the curriculum, is that the idea of great books hasn’t had much of a hold in Europe. At least, that is, until now, with the advent of the Pascal Institute, in the Netherlands, with which St. John’s has formed a partnership.
This is the first thing one sees when going to the St. John’s website: “The following teachers will return to St. John’s College next year,” followed by a scrolling list with such names as Sappho, Sophocles, Lucretius, Virgil, Thomas Aquinas, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Jane Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Flannery O’Connor, and James Baldwin—and, oh yes, Blaise Pascal. Some are American, true. But most of these remarkable figures are European.
Also European, by birth, was St. John’s most famous tutor-teacher of the past few decades, the classicist and philosopher Eva Brann (1929–2024), though she became as American as apple pie. To quote the beautiful appreciation of Brann in The Lamp by St. John’s best-known current tutor-teacher, the classical philosopher Zena Hitz, “Her American identity was the strongest of anyone I have known.” (Read more.)
ShareA 15th-century calendar poem, turning these labours into rhyming verse, has its speaker say in July, ‘With my scythe my mede I mowe’, and in August, ‘And here I shere my corne full lowe’. This work may even have given July one of its names in English: in some sources it is called ‘Mead-month’, which may go back to a lost Old English name, Mædmonað.
A mead and a meadow are the same thing, though the words now have different connotations. Both go back to Old English forms of the same word, mæd and mædwe. They are related to the Germanic base of the verb mow, just as hay is related to the verb hew, i.e. ‘cut down’. A meadow is land that’s ‘mown’, just as hay is grass that’s ‘hewn’.
These days meadow is the usual term in modern English, while mead has become archaic – not quite obsolete, but certainly carrying an old-fashioned and poetic air. It calls to mind literary landscapes more than real ones, such as the place where Keats’ woebegone knight in La Belle Dame Sans Merci ‘met a lady in the meads, full beautiful, a faery’s child’.
Such romantic, medievalising associations of mead, compared to the more ordinary meadow, probably owe something to the way the word is used by Middle English poets, especially Chaucer. Chaucer writes often of meads and their beauties, praising their colourful flowers and fragrant scents and the enchantments that might be met there. At the beginning of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, for instance, the wife nostalgically describes the good old days of King Arthur when Britain was full of fairy magic and ‘The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye, daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede’. (Read more.)
From The Brownstone Institute:
It never mentions the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, which has paid out over $4 billion to families over the decades – a federal court that exists for the sole purpose of acknowledging that these injuries are real. You’d think that would make conversations about risk perfectly reasonable. Apparently not. Instead, raising the topic at all gets you labeled dangerous.
It never mentions the work of researchers like Toby Rogers or organizations like Children’s Health Defense who’ve spent years digging into the actual data on adverse events, pushing back on the accepted risk-benefit math, and demanding that manufacturers and regulators show their work. For what it’s worth, agreeing with everything they publish isn’t the point. These people don’t exist in any mainstream conversation about vaccines. They’re not debated. They’re not refuted. Just absent. If I didn’t know better I’d call that a guardrail, not a mere oversight.
I would argue that absence is doing more to erode public trust than anything those researchers have ever published. When parents go looking for answers and find a whole world of data the New York Times pretends doesn’t exist, they may conclude the Times is handling its readers, not informing them. (Read more.)
From Mark Judge at Hot Air:
A cold Moscow winter in 1930 is the setting for The Trial, a rarely seen but vitally important 2019 documentary by Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa. The Trial - which should not be confused with Trial, the great 1955 anti-communist drama starring Glenn Ford - is constructed of restored black-and-white footage from one of Joseph Stalin’s first show trials, recorded in 1930 in Moscow. Stalin had falsely accused a political rival of seeking to sabotage the USSR at the behest of French Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré and other Western leaders. In shocking footage, the accused, all innocent, confess to crimes they never actually committed.
The Trial is not available on streaming, but I reached out to director Loznitsa and his team was kind enough to provide me with a screener. I am currently in talks with them to perhaps show the film at the upcoming Anti-Communist Film Festival. The Trial is a film that should be shown in every university classroom in the United States and the West. It depicts the kind of nightmare that our own American socialists would not hesitate to inflict on the rest of us. (Read more.)
