Caravaggio’s 10 Most Provocative Paintings

 

From ArtNet:

Caravaggio is probably the ultimate Baroque bad boy. He brawled in the streets, hurled insults in verse, racked up lawsuits like trophies, and may have even committed murder. Yet, despite practically everything about his personal behavior, his paintings are some of the world’s most beautifully rendered, emotionally moving—and unabashedly provocative. Just note his Victorious Cupid (1601–02), which just went on view in the U.K. for the first time, where his polished naturalism brushes up against a frank sexuality; or The Cardsharps (c. 1594), an everyday scene of card players that masks a swindle in action. Here, from the Tenebrist master’s dramatic oeuvre, we spotlight his top 10 paintings, with points awarded for each work’s storytelling, behind-the-scenes intrigue, and sheer audacity.

[...]

 After missing out on seeing Jesus after his resurrection, Thomas was unconvinced that Christ really had risen from the dead, saying he’d need to touch Jesus’s crucifixion wounds himself before he’d believe. And lo and behold, Jesus turned up a week later to call Thomas’s bluff. Caravaggio places the painting’s light source directly behind Jesus, symbolically pulling Thomas into the light as he touches his wound. (Read more.)

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Stolen Elections!

 From Tierney's Real News:

President Trump announced recently that his team was going to show America documented proof of election fraud in the November 2020 election by the end of February 2026. My guess is he’s timing the release to force the Senate GOP to terminate the filibuster and FIX ELECTION FRAUD before the 2026 mid-term elections.

So, I think this is a good time to recap what we knew back then so that when the final numbers DO come out - we can compare! I have reams of data on election fraud but I’m going to synthesize it down to a 10 minute read with just the highlights.

In December 2020, just one month after the stolen election in November 2020, Peter Navarro released a 3 volume report containing a chart of estimated ILLEGAL BALLOTS cast in six swing states.

This is the chart that President Trump, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman hoped to present before Congress and the public at the Capitol on J6 to show how at least 3 MILLION illegal votes were cast IN JUST SIX SWING STATES ALONE to push Biden to the top.

Team Trump didn’t want Congress to certify a fraudulent election on J6 - he wanted them to send it back to the states and let them AUDIT it. The states were willing to do that. (Read more.)

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The Murder of Charlie Kirk

 From The Claremont Review of Books:

Charlie Kirk was a once-in-a-century talent who will not be replaced. He had boundless energy, acute judgment, and a capacity to evolve that was unusual in a public figure. His organization, Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and its political affiliate, Turning Point Action, managed a turnout operation for President Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that helped achieve the biggest popular-vote victory in a generation. Kirk himself could have been on a presidential ticket someday, possibly even the first ticket for which he would have been eligible. Had he lived, he would have turned 35 a month before the 2028 election.

It was a shock, then, to see how Kirk was described in mainstream news outlets in the days following his assassination. The print edition of The New York Times in its obituary headline called him “Organizer of Young Voters Who Helped Shape the Rise of the Hard Right.” The Guardian called him a “divisive provocateur.” That was the respectable media. Down in the gutters of TikTok, X, and its liberal alternative, Bluesky, people were proclaiming their indifference to his death or saying he got what he deserved.

Two things were clear from this reaction. These people didn’t understand who Charlie Kirk was and what he meant to people, and they didn’t grasp how the response to his death would be taken by the Right. Conservatives observed with horror how many people were gloating over the death of a young father because they disagreed with his political opinions. They rightly took it as a portent of a dark period for American democracy.

Open to Questions

Charles James Kirk was born in 1993 and grew up in Prospect Heights, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The high school he attended, Wheeling High School, tipped to being majority Hispanic during his time there and many of his classmates were illegal immigrants. His first effort at political organizing was a success: as a senior, he got his fellow students to protest the raising of the price of cookies in the cafeteria from 25 cents to 50 cents, and the old price was restored.

He chose not to go to college, which led many people in later years to write him off intellectually. This was a mistake. Everyone who thought he was too sophisticated for Charlie Kirk, but gave him a chance, came away impressed. He had an enormous appetite for self-education. One example was his participation in the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowship in 2021. He had already founded an empire by then—Turning Point USA took in over $55 million in revenue that year—yet he wanted to learn what Claremont had to teach him. He was exceptionally humble for someone with his accomplishments. (Read more.)

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Ecce Agnus Dei

 

The Franciscan answer to the Catharist heresy. From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

These icons were in the line of a movement that started in the 12th century of showing the physical and real suffering and death of Christ on the cross that led to the naturalistic depictions of the crucifixion we’re familiar with today. The intention is to generate an emotional response of pity, empathy, sorrow and repentance in the viewer. And this is part of a greater spiritual movement that was later to be popularised by the new mendicant orders, Franciscans and Dominicans, who emphasized the importance of Christ's human and physical suffering and our own ability to “enter into” and participate in it through our affections. Of course, the creation of sacred art is a key component of this kind of evangelisation.

 [...]

As such, the artistic development of these paintings over the following 200 years would be part of a larger and permanent change in the way Christians thought about Christ, their ideas of having a genuine affective relationship with a real person, who knew pain and understood them at a visceral level. The Italo-Byzantine and Duecento panel paintings showing Christ in agony only intensified as more natural looking figures were created.

Master of St. Francis. Perugia National Gallery. It’s impossible for a photo to do justice to it. It smacks you in the head when you walk into the very large room it’s housed in. At least 12 feet tall. You have to stand on the other side of the room to take the whole thing in.

And this movement, in both spirituality and art, is thought by some scholars as a response to the materialist ideas of the Cathar heresy1 that was spreading in Northern Italy and southern France at the time. In the early 12th century the idea that Christ was just a man and His death was of no redemptive significance, were growing.

The Cathars adopted the ancient Manichaean dualistic ideas of two gods; an evil god who created material reality and a good god who created spiritual beings like angels and human souls. The soul was entrapped in the material body and had to be released by a process of spiritual purification and ultimately death. Catharism rejected Catholic sacraments and authority, including the Bible, and its popularity ultimately threatened the political and economic stability of Europe.

Of course this all meant that the Cathars also rejected the redemptive value of the crucifixion, holding that Jesus was just a human being, perhaps inspired by the Holy Ghost, and that the only way to be “saved” was to free the soul from the evil material world. (Read more.)

 

My novel on the Cathars, HERE.

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The Iranian Uprising and the Media’s Moral Blind Spot

 From Alexander Muse at Amuse on X:

The uprising now unfolding in Iran presents Western media with a problem that is not logistical but philosophical. Journalists are not confused about what is happening. They are avoiding it. The avoidance is systematic, patterned, and revealing. It stems from two pressures that converge on the same conclusion. Honest coverage would shatter the moral framework through which Western liberal institutions interpret the world, and it would require admitting that President Trump’s strategy of direct, unapologetic power is working.

Begin with the first pressure. To explain the Iranian uprising honestly is to say something that Western progressive discourse has trained itself not to say. Millions of Iranians are not merely protesting corruption, inflation, or particular leaders. They are rebelling against Islamic rule itself. They are rejecting a governing ideology that regulates speech, family life, women’s bodies, work, art, and survival. They are not asking for reform within clerical power. They are repudiating clerical power as such.

This creates an immediate problem for Western media. Islam, within progressive moral language, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political theology but as a protected identity, analogous to race or ethnicity. Criticism of Islam is therefore framed as prejudice. It is morally suspect by definition. Once this move is made, the Iranian uprising becomes difficult to describe, because its central claim is unintelligible within that framework. The protesters are rejecting something that, according to the framework, cannot be rejected without moral wrongdoing.

A puzzled reader might ask why this is different from criticism of Christianity or other religions. The answer is that it is not different in substance but it is treated as different in discourse. Christianity is analyzed as doctrine, institution, and history. Islam, in progressive media, is treated as identity. This asymmetry matters. If Islam cannot be named as an ideology, it cannot be held responsible for political outcomes. And if it cannot be held responsible, then a revolt against it has no vocabulary. (Read more.)

When reason dies. From Unlicensed Punditry:

Last night I posted on Facebook that I want Tim Walz, Keith Ellison, and Jacob Frey to answer ten very simple questions like “Does America have a border?”

There was not a single question on that list for which the factual answer is anything other than “yes.” None of them rely on emotion, interpretation, or ideology. They simply describe what is, not what some people wish were true.

And unless we get our arms around the emotional instability now driving American political life, we are cooked—aluminum foil in the microwave, timer set to ten minutes, cooked.

Why?

Because no issue—large or small—is being approached through truth or reason anymore. Everything is filtered through raw emotion. We are watching a full-scale renunciation of reason by a significant portion of the population, including its political leadership. Worse still, much of that leadership is doing this by design.

This did not happen by accident. A good deal of it traces back to intellectual arsonists who taught generations of students that language itself is a weapon and truth is merely a social construct. Jacques Derrida and his descendants may not have intended to light the house on fire, but they handed out plenty of matches.

Once language is severed from reality, everything becomes negotiable. Illegal aliens become “our neighbors,” “our people,” “migrants,” or “undocumented persons”—terms that feel good while erasing the fact that these individuals are, by definition, in the country illegally. ICE is accused of “snatching people off the street who committed no crimes,” when in reality it is executing legally mandated removals of people whose very presence constitutes a violation of law—whether by illegal entry or visa overstay. Families are said to be “ripped apart,” yet no similar outrage is expressed when an American citizen is sentenced to prison and separated from his family as a consequence of criminal behavior.

Emotion is selectively deployed, not consistently applied.

I said recently that Minnesota has become the epicenter of the most successful brainwashing operation since Hitler consolidated power in Germany. If that sounded excessive a week ago, the intervening days should have erased any doubt. This is not fringe behavior. It runs from the top of the DFL straight down through the voters who keep rewarding it. Democrats are fond of calling Republicans Nazis, but the people who enabled Hitler were not jackbooted monsters—they were ordinary citizens who swallowed propaganda wholesale. The resemblance is uncomfortable, and it is real.

So much of what the modern left believes—what it wants to believe—is simply false. (Read more.)

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Medieval Mystery of Brunanburh Battle May Be Solved

 From Medievalists:

A long-running debate over the location of one of the most important battles fought in medieval England may finally be nearing an answer. A new study argues that the Battle of Brunanburh, fought in 937, took place at Bromborough on the Wirral, bringing fresh clarity to a question that has occupied historians for more than a century.

The book, Finding the Battle of Brunanburh, published by the University of Chester Press, is written by Paul Cavill, Honorary Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham, and Steve Harding, Professor Emeritus in Applied Biochemistry at the University of Nottingham. The authors present what they describe as the most comprehensive analysis of the available evidence yet undertaken.

Brunanburh was a decisive clash between the West Saxon king Athelstan and a coalition force led by King Anlaf of Dublin, King Constantine of Alba, and King Owain of Strathclyde. After a day-long and exceptionally bloody battle, Athelstan’s army emerged victorious. The defeated Hiberno-Norse forces retreated by sea to Dublin, while the northern British armies returned home. For Athelstan, the victory was the crowning moment of his reign, supporting his claim to be the “ruler of all Britain”. (Read more.)

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A Road Trip to Avalon

 

 

Some young knights on a quest. From The Saxon Cross:

Glastonbury is a weird town. For two thousand years it has been the spiritual center of England. For a long time this was because Glastonbury Abbey was the largest and most powerful monastery on the island. But while the monastery has long lain in ruin, the town is still very much a spiritual center. The town is chockfull of New Age shops, druids, neo-pagans, witches and occultists. Something very real draws this sort of person to the town, and I think some of them are genuine seekers. Of course, they’re looking in all the wrong places, but the power they feel is real. Glastonbury is a Christian holy place and that power still pervades the ground.

First we walked the ruins of the great abbey. This island is littered with the ruin of the work of the Protestant Reformation and King Henry VIII. During King Henry’s dissolution of the monasteries the abbey fell into disrepair, and its last abbot was draw, quartered, and hanged on Glastonbury Tor in 1539. Glastonbury then ceased to be the center of Christianity in the isle, and the blood soaked into the ground has been crying out ever since. The ruins of the monastery are hauntingly beautiful. It is also the purported site of Arthur and Guinevere’s graves, although this is one legend that I think may have been fabricated in the Middle Ages. On the abbey grounds still live the last of the Holy Thorns, the sacred trees that bloom on Christmas Day, that are said to have been brought to the isle of Avalon by St. Joseph of Arimathea.

 On our way up to the Tor we stopped to drink from the Chalice Well, also known as the Red Spring. There are two versions of the legend of this holy well. One claims that St. Joseph buried the Holy Grail inside the Tor, and from it sprang the well. The other claims that he buried two vials, one filled with Christ’s blood and the other with His tears, and from these sprang the Red and White Springs respectively, the White Spring being another holy well just across the street from the Chalice Well garden. Whatever the truth is, the water is full of iron and indeed tastes like blood. Inside the chalice well garden at the foot of the Tor we were met by another one of our companions, Jake, which seemed like a fitting and symbolic place to meet on a spiritual quest. Together we prayed and drank from the well, and then ascended the Tor together. As we began our ascent a rainbow broke out across the sky, crowning St. Michael’s Tower. (Read more.)

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The End Of Private Housing In NYC

 From AND Magazine:

“Private property including and kind of ESPECIALLY homeownership is a weapon of white supremacy masquerading as ‘wealth-building’ public policy.”

These are all Twitter posts by Cea Weaver, Mamdani’s new Director of the Office to Protect Tenants. Weaver is the former director of coalitions at Housing Justice for All, a group that counts dozens of radical, far-left organizations as coalition members, including the Communist Party of the United States of America and the New York Young Communist League.

Mamdani is wasting no time. He is on record as saying that housing should be “decommodified”, which is Marxist-speak for the idea that the real estate you thought you owned should now belong to the state. He is now moving quickly to put that principle into action. The test case he has chosen involves Pinnacle Realty.

Pinnacle owns a total of 146 properties across New York City. It is in bankruptcy proceedings and wants to sell off 93 of these properties. Thousands of New Yorkers are tenants in these buildings. (Read more.)

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The Insurrection That Wasn’t

 From Amuse on X:

Begin with a simple question. What would an insurrection actually look like in the United States? At minimum, it would involve an organized effort to seize state power, coordinated leadership, clear operational objectives, and the use or credible threat of armed force. That is not a controversial definition. It is the ordinary meaning of the term in law, history, and political theory. Measured against that standard, January 6 does not qualify.

What occurred that day was a large political protest that devolved into a riot. That distinction matters. Riots are chaotic, decentralized, and often fueled by emotion rather than strategy. Insurrections are disciplined, planned, and purposeful. We also now know that the transition from protest to riot was not purely organic. Subsequent disclosures have shown that elements of the FBI, DHS, and other state actors were present in the crowd, embedded through informants and confidential sources inciting the riot. Whether through omission, misjudgment, or overt encouragement, these state actors created the conditions in which escalation occurred. The available evidence therefore shows January 6 was the former, not the latter, and that institutional failures and state involvement played a material role in how events unfolded.

Even the FBI eventually acknowledged this. Months after the event, federal investigators quietly conceded that they found scant evidence of any coordinated plan to overturn the election or seize control of the government. Roughly 90% to 95% of the cases involved what the Bureau itself described as one off, spontaneous actions. There was no command structure, no unified chain of authority, and no operational plan that resembled a coup. That admission alone should have forced a reassessment of the dominant narrative. Instead, it was willfully ignored by the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the drive-by media.

Nor was January 6 an armed uprising in any meaningful sense. No protester was known to have fired a gun at the Capitol that day. No armed units attempted to seize offices or detain officials. The crowd did not arrive with rifles, ammunition caches, or tactical coordination. The only gunshot fired that day was by law enforcement, and it killed an unarmed protester, Ashli Babbitt. One need not approve of her actions to recognize the significance of that fact. The image of a heavily armed rebel force simply does not correspond to reality. (Read more.)

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