5 Early-spring Garden Tasks

From Homes and Gardens:

March 20th marks the Spring Equinox, the first day of spring. As sunnier days arrive, our backyards begin to wake up and thaw out. It marks the beginning of long days spent in outdoors, and a reminder there is much to do for us gardeners.

Whether you have already put together a spring gardening checklist or you feel lost with where to get started, there are a few tasks to prioritize for early-spring. Getting your outdoor space prepared for the growing season is key to creating the thriving garden, and there is limited time to get this preparation done.

No matter the spring garden you envisage, horticultural experts say to start by getting these early-spring gardening tasks ticked off. We promise they're all easy to do and will leave you with an immaculate space ready for spring and summer gardening. (Read more.)

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The Politics of Panic

 From Unlicensed Punditry:

I think there is a persistent assumption in American political discourse that voters are simply downstream from ideology—that rank-and-file Democrats believe, in full and conscious detail, the same things their party’s most visible leaders say on cable news or from the Senate floor. That assumption may not hold up, even under casual observation. The average Democratic voter is not a doctrinaire ideologue. They are, like most Americans, busy, distracted, and only intermittently engaged. What they respond to is not a fully formed ideological framework, but a steady emotional narrative—and increasingly, that narrative is built on fear.

This pernicious process sure seems particularly pronounced in the modern Democratic coalition because of how its leadership communicates. Just think about the things the Democrats and their mouthpieces in the national spotlight feel comfortable saying about President Trump and Republicans. They are killing “democracy”, they are pedos, rapists, bigots, and every sort of phobic demon one could conjur. It is war now, war tomorrow and war forever.

This messaging is not about persuading voters toward a set of principles. It is about defining the opposition in the starkest possible terms and stoking resistance, and when you are fighting for survival, nothing is forbidden. The Republican Party is not framed as wrong, misguided, or even flawed, it is framed as dangerous, an existential threat--not just to policy preferences, but to democracy itself, to basic rights, and to personal safety. (Read more.)

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What's Wrong with Modern Dating

 From Elizabeth Stone:

There are many things wrong with modern dating, between the constant need for validation, our inability to wait, our uncontrolled lust, the fact that we treat sex as something casual, and that we use chemistry and feelings as the main guidance for love, you would think these things alone would be enough to explain why so many people feel lost, hurt, detached, and unable to form anything lasting, but honestly, I think there are two deeper things beneath all of it that make the whole situation far worse.

Dating now isn’t just more shallow, dating now has completely changed the way we see people altogether. Somehow, and somewhere along the way we stopped people as someone we want to know, someone to honor, pursue, discern and maybe even possibly fall in love with, instead now we approach others not as a person, but as an experience to be had. I mean even in our language this is obvious, we talk about others like they were some lesson, a story, just a chapter, a fling, an adventure, a waste of time… but the problem is that once another human person becomes just an experience, well it becomes very easy to just consume them and move along.

The second problem is that we have totally inverted the natural order of love, we have given others access to us and our bodies before we even know them, before we are even able to trust them, before commitment before anything that would protect us. We are trying to begin with things that are meant to be the fruit of love, we don’t plant a seed anymore and wait for it to grow, we take the fruit, never plant, and then sit and wonder why nothing ever seems to grow. (Read more.)

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Who Is Queen Mab?

From Barrie's Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, illustrated by Arthur Rackham

From The Imaginative Conservative:

Santayana dedicated some pages to a piece titled “Queen Mab” presumably after the enigmatic faery who is mentioned by Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet.[1] The essay turns into an analysis of British literature, which I take to mean that Santayana saw some form of greater representation in Queen Mab that extended to the wider British psyche. Santayana’s claims regarding British romantic literature, if there is truth in them, add yet another level of genius to Shakespeare, who would have most likely been aware of the duplicity of romance while implementing it in his play. I want first to explain Santayana’s essay—his views regarding British literature—before revisiting the lines where Romeo and Mercutio exchange their thoughts on the meaning of dreams and Queen Mab’s role within them. 

Who is Queen Mab? That is the question this essay will aim to explore. 

Santayana begins his piece by connecting literature to nature. He writes that nature is “far more resourceful than logic,” which is why she has “found a way out the contradiction” that exists between “the human need for expression” and the “British distaste for personal outbursts.” If our inner and outer man oppose each other, then literature is a way to circumvent this contrast. But not all literature is equal. Santayana turns his attention to romantic fiction, which he called a “bypath of expression.” It is a form of literature that is the equivalent of a fleeting phase in our lives, when man plays at “self-revelation” despite being far from it. In Romantic literature man indulges in “day-dreams and romantic transformations” and “imaginary substitutes” for himself as a way to “nurse and develop” his opinions and preferences without stating them directly. Through this form of expression, Santayana writes, man will “dream of what Queen Mab makes other people dream.” 

The sentence needs unpacking. In Santayana’s essay, Queen Mab is England’s literary imagination, but a very specific part of it: the Romantic. And this romantic part of the English literary imagination is a momentary step in our journey towards understanding our hearts. It is, in other words, incomplete. Santayana wrote that a man’s heart, his “ruling motives,” will be revealed “only in long stretches of constant endeavor and faithful habit,” which often comes towards the end of his life. But Queen Mab is still part of the human heart that managed to revolutionize people’s aesthetic sensibilities. British Romanticism elevated man’s self-image. As Santayana wrote, “that which he might have been, and was not, comforts him. Such a form of self-expression, indirect, bashful, and profoundly humorous, being play rather than art, is alone congenial to the British temperament; it is the soul of English literature.” (Read more.)

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Blue Sky, Discord, the Dark Web & MKUltra

 From Tierney's Real News:

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner (WHCD) is a black-tie banquet in Washington, DC. that’s organized by a group of reporters assigned to the White House. The annual event is held at the Washington Hilton, which has hosted the dinner for decades.

The Washington Hilton is also where John Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981. President Trump has boycotted the WHCD during all of Trump’s first term and last year, so this dinner would have been his very first as Commander in Chief and it was a big deal.

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Before we go on and discuss the shooting, I want to remind people WHY President Trump had boycotted the WHCD dinner so far. This background is crucial context, because it shows how DC elites went from seeing Trump as a potential savior in 2011 to a punchline.

Many Republicans are not aware that in 2011, at the WHCD, President Obama and Seth Meyers mercilessly roasted and mocked Donald Trump for considering a GOP Presidential run. It was humiliating and degrading. (Read more.)

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The Madeleine Cemetery

 From Sortir à Paris:

In the 8th arrondissement, there is a discreet garden that is nonetheless steeped in history. It now stands atop the former Madeleine Cemetery and its mass grave where Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette, and hundreds of Revolution-era executions were originally buried, and today it houses the Expiatory Chapel.

In Paris, there are gardens that feel almost secret, yet they hide a grand history. This is one such verdant enclave with a macabre past. Nestled behind the sober façades of the 8th arrondissement, the Louis XVI Square, adjacent to the Expiatory Chapel, sits on the site of the former cimetière de la Madeleine, which during the Revolution became a burial ground for the victims of the guillotine. Behind its appearance as a small, discreet haven, this historic Parisian garden sits atop an old burial ground linked to Louis XVI, to Marie-Antoinette and to hundreds of victims of the Terror.

Originally, the cimetière de la Madeleine opened in the 18th century to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding neighborhood. But during the Revolution, its proximity to today’s Place de la Concorde—then the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine stood—made it a particularly convenient burial site for the bodies of the condemned.

Approximately 500 guillotined were laid to rest there. Among them are famous names such as Olympe de Gouges, Charlotte Corday, Madame du Barry, and several Girondin deputies. King Louis XVI, executed on 21 January 1793, is buried there in an individual grave. Marie-Antoinette, executed on 16 October 1793, was also interred there. Both are said to have been covered with lime.

Following the Revolution and the Empire, Louis XVIII, brother of Louis XVI, chose to mark the site with a commemorative monument. In 1815, the remains believed to be those of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette are transferred to the Basilica of Saint-Denis, after which a chapel is erected on the site of their former burial. The project, entrusted to Pierre Fontaine, gets underway in 1816 and is completed in 1826. The monument is designed in a neoclassical style and today hosts exhibitions open to the public.

The Louis XVI Square as we know it today was laid out later, in the 19th century, when Haussmann’s renovations reshaped the district. Its white floral decorationsecho royalty and the memory of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. But what has become of the mass grave? If the supposed remains of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were moved to the royal necropolis for the kings and queens of France in Saint-Denis, a common view persists that the bodies buried on this site were relocated to the Paris Catacombs, as was the fate of other former intra-mural Paris cemeteries.

In fact, Louis XVIII reportedly insisted that no land “saturated with victims” be taken away from the site. The remains of the old cemetery were thus kept in ossuaries. In other words, even after the monarchs were moved, the place remained a necropolis of the Revolution.

The confusion seems to stem from a Catacombs plaque mentioning another “old Madeleine Cemetery,” located on Laville-Lévêque Street, whereas the cemetery on which the Expiatory Chapel was built lay on Rue d’Anjou. Archaeological surveys conducted in 2018 even confirmed the presence of bones behind the walls of the lower chapel. (Read more.)

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Chinoiserie in Architecture

 

From The Collector:

Located in the Sanssouci Park, the Chinesisches Haus (“Chinese House”) in Potsdam, Germany, was built between 1755 and 1764. Commissioned by Prussian king Frederick the Great, the project was headed by German master builder Johann Gottfried Büring. The Chinese House is characterized by its trefoil shape, which was inspired by the Maison du Trèfle at the Palace of Lunéville in Lorraine. Its exteriors feature four prominent gilded sandstone columns alongside several playful, life-sized gilded sculptures of Chinese musicians and tea drinkers. These were the works of German sculptors Johann Melchior Kambly, Johann Gottlieb Heymüller, and Johann Peter Benckert.

The Chinoiserie style continues in the building’s interiors with a vast collection of 18th-century porcelain and a large fresco depicting a whimsical gathering. It features numerous Chinese men standing behind a balustrade, some glancing around and others engaged in conversation. In the surroundings, there are peacocks, parrots, monkeys, statues of Buddha, and many other Chinoiserie motifs. Frederick the Great, as a fervent admirer of Chinoiserie, would later follow up with two additional Chinese-style structures. One was the Chinese Kitchen, located just a stone’s throw from the Chinese House, and the other was the Drachenhaus (“Dragon House”), located at the northern part of the Sanssouci Park. (Read more.)

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Watching the World Burn

 From Unlicensed Punditry:

The latest round of revelations about Southern Poverty Law Center isn’t shocking so much as it is clarifying. It’s like finally reading the fine print on a contract you were told not to worry about. You don’t discover anything new; you just confirm what you already suspected.

What it does remind you of, though, are two simple truths that explain far more about modern political behavior than any academic paper ever will. First, much of what passes for “reality” among a certain activist class is not observed, it’s intentionally constructed. Second, if you want more of something, you subsidize it. That rule works just as well in politics as it does in agriculture.

Look around and you start to see the pattern. From students chanting “ICE Out” and “No KKK,” to the endlessly recycled Charlottesville narrative, to the slow-motion denial and eventual admission of Hunter Biden’s laptop, you are not dealing with a series of honest misunderstandings. You are watching a system that produces narratives on demand, distributes them widely, and then defends them long after they’ve been exposed as fiction.

Take immigration enforcement. There is no credible evidence that ICE is out there running some kind of racial sorting algorithm before doing its job. None. But you wouldn’t know that if you spent five minutes on a college campus where the chants are delivered with the confidence of revealed truth. It’s not about evidence, it’s about utility. The narrative serves a purpose, so it stays.

Charlottesville is even more instructive. The “very fine people” hoax was debunked almost immediately for anyone who bothered to read past the headline. That didn’t stop it from becoming a cornerstone of modern political mythology. It was cited, repeated, canonized, and eventually elevated to campaign-launch status. Joe Biden built an entire presidential run on it. Kamala Harris still invokes it like it’s carved into stone tablets somewhere. The fact that it never actually happened as described is treated as a minor inconvenience, like a typo in an otherwise useful document.

Then there’s the laptop. The one that was “Russian disinformation” right up until it wasn’t. The one that required a synchronized media blackout, a parade of former intelligence officials, and a healthy dose of social media censorship to keep the narrative intact long enough to get through an election cycle. Now that it’s acknowledged as real, the same people who dismissed it have simply moved on, no apology, no correction, just a quiet pivot to the next approved outrage. (Read more.)

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The Lost Medieval Pronouns of English Intimacy

 From the BBC:

Which word would you use to refer to yourself? "I", presumably, in the singular. And how about you and a group of people? "We", of course, in the plural.

But how about you and one other person? 

In modern English, there is no word for that. You would probably just use "we" or "the two of us".

But more than 1,000 years ago, you would have said: "wit".

This term, once also used affectionately to describe the closeness between two people, is one of many personal pronouns that have been lost or transformed amid huge social and political change over the centuries.  The English language has become simplified – but at times this has left gaps, creating confusion.

"Wit" means "we two" in Old English, a Germanic language spoken in England until about the 12th Century, which evolved into the English we speak today. Now completely lost, "wit" was part of an extinct group of pronouns used for exactly two people: the dual form, which also includes "uncer" or "unker" ("our" for two people) and "git" ("you two"). That dual form vanished from the English language around the 13th Century. (You can hear how some of these were pronounced in the short clips later in this article.)

"There's a whole history in the [personal] pronouns", including the impact of Viking and Norman invasions on the English language alongside shifting norms and customs that have changed how we talk, says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland. (Read more.)

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