The Banality of an Evil Pro-Abortion Art Exhibit

 From Mark Judge at Chronicles:

Still, the effect of seeing Andrea Bowers’ art was mostly enervation. This kind of angry political art is by now very old hat. Take the first room one enters at the exhibit. In Wall of Letters: Necessary Reminders from the Past for a Future of Choice, Bowers has simply reproduced dozens of letters of women seeking abortions, as well as guides on how to perform abortions, blown them up to poster size, and wallpapered a huge white room with them. This performative exercise might have shocked people a few decades ago, but by now the public has already absorbed and passed its judgment on the nonsense of artists like Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. We have moved on. A hectoring and didactic display meant to incite insurrection in defense of abortion is old news. I mean, I was around to see Karen Finley smear herself with chocolate!

Bowers does better in the other rooms at Glenstone, which feature her pieces The Body is Not a Thing, It’s a Situation and Women and the Earth Have to Tolerate a Lot. Bowers has reproduced book illustrations, both from 1896, on square panels of cardboard. The illustrations themselves are quite beautiful, lovely representations of women in flowing Victorian dresses bodies intertwined. The original drawings were meant to illuminate women as deeply powerful and fertile beings with a seamless and metaphysical connection to nature. Then there are the works Ecofeminist Sycamore Branches: Women Have Always Thought Like Mountains, which feature tree branches illuminated with neon. The irony, of course, is that Bowers is using imagery evocative of the sensual and generative power of women to argue for killing babies. (Read more.)

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Court Masques

Costume design by Inigo Jones for Queen Anne's "Masque of Blackness"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another design by Inigo Jones for one of Henrietta Maria's masques

The court of Charles I in costume in a classical fantasy, Buckingham and his life Katherine are staring up at Charles I and Henrietta Maria.

Henrietta Maria of France

Masques were a big part of court life in both the English and French courts of the seventeenth century, especially during Shrovetide. From Historic Royal Palaces:

The masque began as an improvised performance at court in the 16th century during which courtiers and even royals would disguise themselves for play acting, fun and dancing. 

Masques were staged at Whitehall and Hampton Court Palaces for the Stuarts, with singing, acting, music, dialogue, amazing costume and above all, ‘special effects’ and moving scenery. By the early 1600s, under masque-loving monarchs James I and his queen Anne of Denmark, it became really elaborate. 

A Banqueting House was built specifically for the performance of masques at Whitehall Palace in 1608, but this burnt down in 1619, and was replaced by the present building, designed by Inigo Jones and completed in 1622. 

The Stuart Masques were mostly created by the brilliant partnership of playwright Ben Jonson and set and costume designer Inigo Jones. These temperamental artists quarrelled over whose contribution was more important, and after 1632, Jones worked with less argumentative (and less talented) poets.

The masques were a heady combination of opera, theatre, ballet and ball. They were always allegorical, featuring gods and goddesses from mythology and British history. Their purpose was to demonstrate the wisdom, and God-given right to rule, of the Stuart monarchs. There was always an ‘anti-masque’, featuring wild and outlandish dancers, who symbolised the chaos of a kingdom before the Stuarts. This was followed by the masque proper portraying the idealistic world of peace and harmony under divine kingship. At the end of the masque, the King would dance, and then the courtiers. Masques were performed for, rather than by, the court, although sometimes the queen and her ladies danced. 

A masque was also a place to see and be seen. They were incredibly expensive to produce; some of the most lavish were staged by affluent lawyers. But despite the cost, they weren’t always the most comfortable of shows to attend, for either actors or audiences. The crowded room was stifling hot, and smoke from the hundreds of torches must have been oppressive. Sometimes there was a long delay before the performance began. The chaplain to the Venetian Ambassador wrote of his experience after attending a masque in 1618: ‘So crowded and uncomfortable that had it not been for our curiosity we would have given up or expired … every box was filled notably with the most noble and richly arrayed ladies… During the two hours of waiting we had leisure to examine them again and again.’ (Read more.)

From Luminarium:

HAD Ben Jonson never lived, the English masque would scarcely need to be chronicled among dramatic forms. For despite the fact that mumming, disguising, and dancing in character and costume were pastimes in England quite as old, if not older, than the drama itself, it is to Jonson that we owe the infusion of dramatic spirit into these productions, together with the crystallization of their discordant elements into artistic unity and form. Generically, the masque is one of a numerous progeny, of more or less certain dramatic affiliation. Specifically, a masque is a setting, a lyric, scenic, and dramatic framework, so to speak, for a ball.¹  It is made up of "a combination, in variable proportions, of speech, dance, and song;" and its "essential and invariable feature is the presence of a group of dancers . . . called masquers."²   These dancers — who range in number from eight to sixteen — are commonly noble and titled people of the court. They neither speak nor sing, nor is it usual to exact of them any difficult or unusual figures, poses, or dances. Their function is the creation of "an imposing show" by their gorgeous costumes and fine presence, enhanced by artistic grouping, and by the aids which decoration and scenic contrivance can lend to the united effect. On the other hand, the speech of the masque, whether of presentation or in dialogue, and the music, both vocal and instrumental, were from the first in the hands of the professional entertainer, and developed as other entertainments at court developed. The masque combined premeditated with unpremeditated parts. The first appearance of the masquers with their march from their "sieges" or seats of state in the scene, and their first dance — all designated the "entry" — was carefully arranged and rehearsed; so also was the return to the "sieges" or "going cut," and this preparation included sometimes the preceding dance. The "main," too, or principal dance, was commonly premeditated, as in Jonson Masque of Queens, where the masquers and their torchbearers formed in their gyrations the letters of the name of Prince Charles. Between the "main" and the "going out," two extemporal parts were interpolated, the "dance with the ladies" and the "revels," which last consisted of galliards, corantos, and la voltas. It was in the development of the "entry" and the "main" that the growth of the masque chiefly consisted. (Read more.)

From Dr. Lawrence Shafe:

There was an Italian tradition, particularly a Florentine tradition, called the intermezzi. These were entertainments designed to fill in the gap between plays. The key series was in 1589 when the Grand Duke got married. They were trying to recreate a Roman theatre with classical allegory in the form of an entertainment. Bernado Buontalenti was the architect engineer of these displays.

A 1600 Florentine drawing shows a mountain rising from a stage, at the top is Pegasus with Apollo and the Muses below and Poetry below them. Clouds float in with people in them and they have trees that sprout leaves. Light boxes were used containing multiple candles made brighter with mirrors and the theatres were not darkened as much as ours. This event was publicized across Europe and news came back to Henry, Prince of Wales. His friend John Harrington was in Florence and wrote back describing them.

The intermezzi increased the scale and the engineering (trap doors, revolving stages) and it was these the Stuart court wanted to emulate.

Ben Johnson and Inigo Jones were the great double act although they eventually fell out.

Caroline masques in England had a stage with a proscenium arch (first developed in the 16thC in Florence and picked up by Jones). The stage tilts at an angle and it has slots in the sides for scenery. In 1635 Inigo Jones a country scene for The Temple of Love. 1609 Jones, [at] The Masque of Queens for Anne of Denmark [made] a machine with a round arch doorway and a revolving section on top with seats. The machine was called machina versitilis.

Anne of Denmark was the prime mover to create these spectacular masques. She loved dancing and was the leading dancer. She singled out Ben Johnson but the ideas were unfortunately hers so they were all a bit thin. All the music and choreography has been lost, in fact the scenery was pulled down and destroyed as soon as the masque was over. They were modelled on the French ballet do corps where the dancers formed a complex pattern. James I never ever took part. (Read more.)

 HERE is the original program for the ballet danced by Henrietta Maria at the Louvre when Charles first saw her.

An article on the masques of Queen Henrietta Maria, HERE.

More on the stage props created by Inigo Jones, HERE.

My novel on Henrietta Maria, HERE.
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Wolves in White Coats

 From Human Flourishing:

Yesterday the Department of Health and Human Services released a report, Wolves in White Coats. Along with surgeon and whistleblower Dr. Eithan Haim, I drafted the first two chapters of the report, and my colleague Rachel Morrison at EPPC drafted the third chapter. The report describe how hospitals and clinics recklessly embraced sex-rejecting procedures on minors, despite the lack of evidence of safety and efficacy for these interventions. Our research on insurance claims, presented in Chapter 2, highlights widespread false billing practices that could implicate these institutions in criminal fraud under the False Claims Act. In short, doctors lied about patients’ diagnoses to ensure insurance reimbursements from public and private payers, and in some cases, to circumvent state laws that prohibited these procedures on minors.

The full report and a shorter executive summary are available here. For those who want a brief, high-level overview, I recommend this 12-minute film released in conjunction with the report. The testimonies here from adolescents who were irreversibly harmed by these procedures are particularly devastating....(Read more.)

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Dating as Duty

 From Chronicles:

On the left, one of the most prominent works on this question is the New York Times’ essay “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back” by Rachel Drucker. Leftists never consider the mess that is the modern dating world—or their role in creating it—and how it might incentivize the “good men” to go their own way. 

Consider the #MeToo movement. After watching baseless accusations destroy the lives of countless powerful men, modest guys stopped pursuing women. When the media, divorce courts, and prospective employers decided to #BelieveAllWomen, young males afflicted by nothing worse than shyness backed off, because they didn’t want to become the object of social ridicule or make women uncomfortable. Courtship died.

Certainly, there are bad men out there, but rather than consider them an outlier, the left has encouraged young women to take a negative view of men in general. 

While many establishment conservatives frame the issue differently, they agree that the courtship crisis is men’s fault. Fox News darling Tomi Lahren, for example, insists that “the pickings are slim” for young women seeking quality masculine men who have their affairs in order.

Attributing blame to a failure of personal responsibility on the part of men is, however, only a half-truth. Men are leaving dating behind because they no longer believe it’s possible to achieve what their fathers and grandfathers did. 

Social conservatives love to blame pornography, but they get cause and effect backward. Porn does not cause men to retreat from dating; modern dating causes men to retreat into porn. 

After realizing they were playing a losing game, a good many men stopped dating. They made the calculation that porn was the best they were going to get. You can think that ignoble—I certainly do—but they’ve come by that conclusion honestly. Of course, the same can be said of all the other petty vices our young men use to while away their days—video games, online trolling, doomscrolling, anonymous posting on 4chan, et cetera. (Read more.)

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Saint Louis IX and Politics

 From Catholicism:

Today is the feast of King Saint Louis of France. As the formerly Christian West is sliding further into the tyranny of liberalism, it is balm to the soul to consider that the people in Louis’ France were freer than we are today. They were free from big government meddling in their lives and their wallets. And they were free in the most important way, for Saint Louis believed in a Christian order wherein the State was neither inimical nor neutral to the Church, but was the Church’s helper in securing the happiness, temporal and eternal, of her subjects.

Our modern “freedom,” by contrast, is servitude.

Sad to say, Saint Louis’ own grandson, Philip IV (“the Fair” — called so on account of his outward looks, not his inward dispositions!) was greedy to rob the Church of her influence in civil society. It has long struck me as ironic that this same Philip, who was so ill disposed to the traditional role of the Church in statecraft, was also the one who persecuted the Knights Templar, robbing them of their possessions and murdering their leaders. One of his victims was Jacques de Molay, the twenty-third and last Grand Master of the Templars. The reason I find all this ironic, is that the Freemasons, who are much closer to Philip than to de Molay in their ideology, falsely take the murdered Templar as one of their own heroes — among other ways, by naming their young men’s fraternal organization, “DeMolay International.” Philip IV, who murdered Jacques de Molay, also persecuted Pope Boniface VIII, a great pope who defended — as I’ve pointed out elsewhere — the same traditional alliance of throne and altar that Philip’s saintly grandfather believed in. That tradition, known as “the doctrine of the two swords,” was eloquently put forth in Unam Sanctam, a bull written in direct opposition to Philip the Fair.

It was Boniface VIII, by the way, who canonized Saint Louis IX. (Read more.)

 

More HERE.

Also from Catholicism:

The custom of genuflecting (literally, in Latin, “bending the knee”) for the Incarnation (“…and the Word was made Flesh…”) in the Creed, was begun by Saint Louis IX, King of France, who knelt out of devotion when he heard the words sung at Mass one day. This is something of a holy mirror of the secular custom of standing for the “Hallelujah Chorus” in Handel’s Messiah. (King George II was so stirred during the performance that he rose to his feet in excitement. When the king stands, everybody stands, even during a concert.) Similarly, thanks to Louis’ piety, and the French respect for their monarch, the King of Kings is saluted with a genuflection every time his Holy Incarnation is recalled in the Credo of the Roman Rite. (Read more.)

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Seven Years of History: the Seditious Six

From DataRepublican:

 The Seditious Six video did not came out of nowhere in November 2025. It developed from an institutional lineage over a period of about eight years among academics, NGOs, and activists, with the final goal to rewrite the relationship between the military and the executive branch.

On January 30, 2017 — ten days into the first Trump presidency — Rosa Brooks published a piece in Foreign Policy laying out four ways to remove a sitting president before his term ended: impeachment, the 25th Amendment, resignation under pressure, and a military coup. Of the last, she imagined the moment senior officers would look at a lawful commander-in-chief and refuse:

“The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders.”

Brooks had been Counselor to the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, a political appointee inside the Pentagon from 2009 to 2011, reporting to Michèle Flournoy. Before the Pentagon, she was special counsel to the President at George Soros’s Open Society Institute. After it, she went to Georgetown Law, where she still holds a professorship and participates in the university’s national-security programming.

One year after that article ran, a new organization was quietly incorporated. National Security Action - co-chaired by Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes and future Biden national security advisor Jake Sullivan — was funded largely, in Puck’s words, by Alex Soros since its inception. Rosa Brooks joined its advisory council.

That is the beginning of the timeline the Pentagon press corps skipped. (Read more.)

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Traditions: The Chapel Veil

 From Catholic 365:

The chapel veil is also called a mantilla, and is worn by Catholic women to honor the Lord as truly present in the Eucharist. This is a very old tradition and is also a symbol of imitation of Mary, the Mother of God. The wearing of the Mantilla is an act of veiling a woman's physical beauty, so that the beauty of God may be glorified instead. It is also a way of emulating Mary, our mother, who is the archetype of purity and humility.  Moreover, the mantilla, or chapel veil, signifies the role of women as a life-bearing vessel.  The chalice holding the blood of Christ is veiled until the Preparation of the Gifts, and the tabernacle is veiled between Masses. Both of these vessels hold the Eucharist – the very life of Christ. (Read more.)

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La Reine Margot and the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre

A first hand account from a notorious lady, who nevertheless saved the life of her husband Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV. Henri IV, through his second marriage to Marie de' Medici, was the father of Queen Henrietta Maria.

Five or six days afterwards, those who were engaged in this plot, considering that it was incomplete whilst the King my husband and the Prince de Conde remained alive, as their design was not only to dispose of the Huguenots, but of the Princes of the blood likewise; and knowing that no attempt could be made on my husband whilst I continued to be his wife, devised a scheme which they suggested to the Queen my mother for divorcing me from him. Accordingly, one holiday, when I waited upon her to chapel, she charged me to declare to her, upon my oath, whether I believed my husband to be like other men. "Because," said she, "if he is not, I can easily procure you a divorce from him." I begged her to believe that I was not sufficiently competent to answer such a question, and could only reply, as the Roman lady did to her husband, when he chid her for not informing him of his stinking breath, that, never having approached any other man near enough to know a difference, she thought all men had been alike in that respect. "But," said I, "Madame, since you have put the question to me, I can only declare I am content to remain as I am;" and this I said because I suspected the design of separating me from my husband was in order to work some mischief against him....(Read more.)

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Make All of America Muslim?

 From Tierney's Real News:

Most people are not aware that Hillary Clinton brought Huma Abedin and the Muslim Brotherhood into the White House in the 1990s and then shortly thereafter 9/11 happened.

THIS IS HOW THEY SCHEMED TO MAKE ALL OF AMERICA MUSLIM.

I posted an article on my old blog website and on social media in March 2018. It was about Hillary Clinton, her “new” aide Huma Abedin and a threat made by one of their associates, Sharifa Alkhateeb, the then head of the North American Council for Muslim Women, in 1989, to “MAKE ALL OF AMERICA MUSLIM.” (Read more.)

The DSA wants to transform America. From The Enterprise:

 On July 16, 2026, the World Bank approved a $1.5 billion loan to modernize South Africa's electricity, freight rail, water, and sanitation systems. It is the fourth rescue of this kind since 2022, which means the first three left the wreck standing. The conditions attached to the money are a list of the ordinary rules Pretoria spent a generation discarding. The government is to build a competitive wholesale electricity market, open transmission to private investment, allow private rail operators to compete for freight, grant the first private concession at a port terminal, and let private firms provide water. Those conditions are the sound of a creditor describing a machine that no longer runs.

Maintenance, competition, professional management, and independent oversight keep a grid from becoming a patronage office. Conservatives who treat institutions as machines have been saying so while Democrats in American cities treat the same institutions as prizes for the faithful. The African National Congress is the party that removed those disciplines. It is also the party now borrowing to put them back. The wrecking crew is sending the invoice abroad.

The claim is not that apartheid was just. In 1994 the ANC inherited an industrial economy that was unjustly distributed and technically sophisticated. The duty that came with that inheritance was to universalize access without destroying the competence that kept the lights on and the ore moving to the sea. The party did the opposite. It converted technical administration into political allocation. In thirty years it consumed capital that had taken generations to assemble. Democrats who now talk the same way about American agencies, as if competence were a colonial residue, are watching a finished experiment and applauding the method. (Read more.)

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