My Lagan Love

Where Lagan stream sings lullaby 
There blows a lily fair 
The twilight gleam is in her eye 
The night is on her hair 
And like a love-sick leánan sídhe
She has my heart in thrall 
Nor life I own nor liberty 
For love is lord of all.  

Her father sails a running-barge 
'Twixt Leamh-beag and The Druim; 
And on the lonely river-marge 
She clears his hearth for him. 
When she was only fairy-high 
Her gentle mother died; 
But dew-Love keeps her memory 
Green on the Lagan side.  

And often when the beetle's horn 
Hath lulled the eve to sleep 
I steal unto her shieling lorn 
And thru the dooring peep. 
There on the cricket's singing stone, 
She spares the bogwood fire, 
And hums in sad sweet undertone 
The songs of heart's desire  

Her welcome, like her love for me, 
Is from her heart within: 
Her warm kiss is felicity 
That knows no taint of sin.
And, when I stir my foot to go, 
'Tis leaving Love and light
To feel the wind of longing blow 
From out the dark of night.  

Where Lagan stream sings lullaby 
There blows a lily fair 
The twilight gleam is in her eye 
The night is on her hair 
And like a love-sick leánan sídhe
She has my heart in thrall 
Nor life I owe nor liberty 
For love is lord of all. 

(from an old Irish song)
A beautiful rendition, HERE, HERE and HERE.

To quote from Mary O'Hara's notes on this song, from her book A Song For Ireland:

The leánan sídhe (fairy mistress) mentioned in the song is a malicious figure who frequently crops up in Gaelic love stories. One could call her the femme fatale of Gaelic folklore. She sought the love of men; if they refused, she became their slave, but if they consented, they became her slaves and could only escape by finding another to take their place. She fed off them so her lovers gradually wasted away - a common enough theme in Gaelic medieval poetry, which often saw love as a kind of sickness. Most Gaelic poets in the past had their leanán sídhe to give them inspiration. This malignant fairy was for them a sort of Gaelic muse. On the other hand, the crickets mentioned in the song are a sign of good luck and their sound on the hearth a good omen. It was the custom of newly-married couples about to set up home to bring crickets from the hearths of their parents' house....

(Artwork)

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Eating the Elephant One Bite at a Time

 From Tierney's Real News:

Trump has always been honest about what he values: battlefield presence, TV “central casting” presence, and the ability to sell his strategies to the public and keep the base fired up.

Pam Bondi did her job — she empaneled grand juries, put boots on the ground in Florida, and set the stage for the prosecutions Trump wanted to see. Ultimately, her track record in cases is the best the DOJ has seen in 50 years. But she never really learned how to play the media board. She is better in a courtroom than on TV.

Bondi is good at the mechanics of the job. She lined up cases. She did her best to put the right prosecutors in place. She cleared the way for the kind of RICO‑style grand conspiracy work now targeting figures like John Brennan. In that sense, she was the perfect rook: you move her straight into the right squares and then let someone else handle the finishing moves.

Trump loved Pam Bondi enough to put her in the Attorney General’s chair, but he also found out she’s not built for the TV war — so he’s moved her to the private sector, where she can amplify his message like Dan Bongino is doing right now - rather than slow‑walk it from inside the DOJ. Remember, President Trump said nobody knows how someone will perform until they are tested. Correct!

Now Tulsi Gabbard, Todd Blanche, Kash Patel, and Joe diGenova are lining up the pieces for what could be the biggest legal reckoning in the deep state’s history.

Trump still loves her, but he’s not blind. He knows that if you’re going to run the Justice Department in a hyper‑visible political war, you need someone who can show up on TV, talk directly to the camera, and keep the Fox‑News‑and‑talk‑radio‑aligned audience engaged. That’s not Bondi’s strength. That’s Blanche’s role now.

Her move to the private sector could be a lot more useful than harmful. She can go out and talk, write, build a media presence, and operate like Dan Bongino — not from inside the bureaucracy, but as an outside voice that amplifies what the administration is doing. That’s often more powerful than a hesitant, over‑cautious mouthpiece in a government chair. (Read more.)

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Romans, Not “Byzantines”

 From Medievalists:

Few historical civilizations suffer from a greater identity mismatch than the Byzantine Empire. To modern readers, “Byzantine” conjures images of decadence, intrigue, and a shadowy afterlife of ancient Rome. Yet to the people who lived in the empire we now call Byzantine, this label would have been meaningless. They did not call themselves Byzantines. They did not believe they lived in a successor state. They were Rhomaioi—Romans—and their empire was the Roman Empire.

Understanding how Byzantines saw themselves is more than a matter of semantics. It reshapes our understanding of medieval history, Roman continuity, and the profound cultural divide between Eastern and Western Europe. The Byzantine self-image as Roman endured for more than a thousand years, surviving language change, religious transformation, territorial loss, and even the fall of Rome itself. (Read more.)

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Mystery of a 17th-Century Portrait

 

 From ArtNet:

It is not known when the painting entered the collection of the Sidney family, which has lived at Penshurst Place since Tudor times. However, it was first recorded at the family home in 1743 and has been on public display since 1947.

The NPG’s senior curator for research, Charlotte Bolland, has described the painting as “an incredibly early” full-length depiction of a person of African heritage in England. She told ITV that portraits were typically reserved for elite subjects “who were interested in conveying messages about themselves.” She described the portrait as particularly “ambitious and unusual” in its presentation of two young boys side-by-side.

Conservators have lifted layers of discolored varnish from the canvas, allowing the work to “really come to life,” said Bolland.

A deeper investigation into the portrait has so far included both a technical analysis, including examining pigments and using radiography to look beneath the surface, and extensive archival research to try and find hints about who the two boys might be. Speaking to the BBC, Bolland described the work as “a real collaborative effort.” Dress historians, hunting historians, and genealogists are among the experts who will weigh in. (Read more.)

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Why America is at War with Iran

 From Culturcidal:

America’s entanglement with Iran really started when they elected a prime minister who soon thereafter nationalized their oil industry, which the British then controlled. We tried to mediate the issue between the countries, but we were closer allies with Britain and soon began to fear that Iran was going to drift toward the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence. During the Cold War, when the United States and the Soviets treated the whole planet like pieces on a chessboard, this drove a lot of our foreign policy decisions. In this case, it prompted us to partner with Britain and help the Shah of Iran, who was already part of the government, to take FULL CONTROL of the country.

The Shah was friendly to us. He also wanted to Westernize Iran and make it into a regional power. He had some success on this front. Economic conditions improved rapidly, he gave women the right to vote (although voting for everyone was limited), their military became stronger, and things were going in the right direction in Iran in many respects.

That being said, the Shah was a dictator and would still throw you in prison if you stood against him. This led to the Iranian Revolution in 1979.

Although many groups across Iran helped to get rid of the Shah, ultimately, the religious crazies led by the Ayatollah Khomeini ended up in charge. As it turned out, they were more oppressive than the Shah, more murderous, and the rapid improvement of Iran that happened under the Shah dramatically slowed down and even regressed in many ways. (Read more.)

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That Vulgar Necklace

 Marie-Antoinette was the victim of the entire debacle. From Country Life:

The story begins in 1772, when Louis XV commissioned an enormous diamond necklace for his maîtresse-en-titre, Madame du Barry. For 200,000,000 livres (about £12 million today), the royal jewellers Boehmer and Bassenge were to create a rivière consisting of 647 flawless, perfectly matched diamonds; a necklace so heavy that it would have to have diamond streamers down the back to prevent the wearer from toppling forward.

In 1774, Louis XV died. Undeterred, Boehmer and Bassenge completed the necklace and, in 1778, just after war had been declared on Britain, offered it to Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. For whatever reason — Thomas Carlyle quotes the queen as saying ‘We have more need of seventy-fours [ships] than necklaces’ — she refused it.

For the next two years, Boehmer and Bassenge hawked the necklace around the royal courts of Europe without success. In 1781, following the birth of the dauphin, they again tried to sell it to Louis XVI — and again were rebuffed. This was the year in which Jeanne de Valois-Saint-Rémy, an impoverished and unscrupulous young woman, began to insinuate herself into royal circles by pretending to be one of Marie Antoinette’s closest confidantes. In 1783, she achieved her greatest social success when she was taken up by Cardinal de Rohan — nearly twice her age, extremely wealthy and, frankly, not that bright.

De Rohan had lost all chance of preferment, having publicly insulted Marie Antoinette’s mother. He yearned to be accepted back at court and de Valois offered to carry a letter of apology to the Queen. The forged response de Valois brought back was, unsurprisingly, encouraging. Further forged letters convinced de Rohan that the Queen was in love with him and that he should give money to de Valois, which he did. Her problem now was that the cardinal kept pressing for a meeting with sa Majesté. How relieved de Valois must have been when she encountered a prostitute, Marie Nicole Leguay d’Oliva, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the Queen and was willing, for a fee, to take part in a practical joke. (Read more.)

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Childhood of Mary Stuart

From English Historical Fiction Writers: 

Although historians often cast the dismissal of her playmates in a harsh light, Poissy was only a few miles from Saint Germain.  The Four Maries often visited the palace on weekends and holidays. They had not been exiled to an austere convent in a backwater location. The convent school at Saint Louis Priory provided a high-quality liberal education to its aristocratic students. Even religious policies were flexible to a degree. Marie Livingston, whose family embraced the new learning, was encouraged but not forced to attend Mass. By the time the Four Maries reached puberty, they were well educated and highly polished French girls, ready to be integrated into the life at the French court.  Nevertheless, their place in the life of the Queen had been taken by the Princesses Elisabeth and Claude, and their brother Francois, the Dauphin.

By the time she was eleven, the Queen of Scots might well have been homesick for her mother, but there is no reason to think she missed or even remembered the land of which she was sovereign. (Read more.)

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The Deep State Diplomats Who Failed

 From Amuse on X:

On April 15, 2026, TIME published a piece by Philip Wang carrying the headline “It’s Not Working: Diplomats Fear Trump’s Iran Envoys Are Making Things Worse.” The article rests almost entirely on three named former officials, Aaron David Miller, David Satterfield, and Robert Einhorn, who are presented as sober experts watching amateurs fumble a delicate file. The framing is familiar. The evidentiary basis is weaker than the framing suggests. It is worth walking through what these three men actually did in government, what they did not do, and what the record shows about the men they are criticizing. Once that is done, a further question comes into view. It concerns whether the category “experienced diplomat” is doing the analytical work Wang assumes it is doing, and whether, in fact, the opposite proposition may be closer to the truth.

Begin with Miller. He spent 24 years at the State Department, from 1978 to 2003, advising six secretaries of state on Arab-Israeli negotiations. His principal file was the Syria-Israel track. That track produced no agreement during his tenure. The Camp David summit in July 2000, at which he was present, collapsed. Miller has been candid about this record. His own CNN biography describes him as having spent “a couple decades in and around failing Arab-Israeli negotiations,” and his 2008 book is titled “The Much Too Promised Land: America’s Elusive Search for Arab-Israeli Peace.” In a History News Network essay, he wrote that he knows “a thing or two about failure.” This is not a partisan characterization. It is his self-description. A reader is entitled to ask why a man who acknowledges having worked on failed negotiations for thirty years is positioned by TIME as the benchmark against which current envoys should be measured.

Consider next Satterfield. He is associated in the public mind with the Israel-Lebanon maritime border agreement, and he did work on an early framework for those talks between 2017 and 2019. But the agreement itself was signed on October 27, 2022, and it was brokered by Amos Hochstein, not by Satterfield. AIPAC credited Hochstein by name. Al Jazeera credited Hochstein by name. Satterfield was one of at least four American envoys who handled the file over a period of years, and he was not the one in the room when it closed. His more recent work is also worth noting. From October 2023 to May 2024, he served as President Biden’s Special Envoy for Middle East Humanitarian Issues. In December 2024, he told CBS News that Trump was “exaggerating” Turkey’s influence over Syrian rebel forces. Wang does not disclose the Biden role or the CBS appearance to his readers.(Read more.)

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The Last Aztec Princess

From The Collector:

 When the Spanish arrived in Tenochtitlan, the Aztec were ruled by Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, better and less accurately known as Moctezuma II, the powerful huey tlatoani who had expanded the empire to its greatest extent. Chroniclers marveled at his many wives, lesser wives and concubines, as well as his numerous children, with one claiming he had at least 100. History recorded just a few, however, including two sons who died during the conquest and one legitimate daughter, often called the last Aztec princess: Isabel.

Little is known for certain about Isabel’s life before the arrival of the Spanish colonizers. Her birth year, which of Moctezuma’s many wives was her mother, or even the correct translation of her Nahuatl name, are unknown. Some contemporary records and documents kept by the Spanish give her birth year as 1510, which would have made her just 9 years old at the time the conquest began in 1519, and when she first married. Others describe her as a maiden, suggesting she was not a child but a girl of marriageable age, while still others indicate she was born before Moctezuma became huey tlatoani, which occurred in 1503, making her a young adult when Hernán Cortés and his contingent of conquistadors arrived.

Contemporary accounts are equally unclear about her lineage, with some suggesting she was the daughter of Moctezuma’s first wife and others indicating she was born of one of his secondary wives. Marriages were often undertaken to cement alliances with neighboring groups, while marrying within family groups to preserve the noble or semi-divine bloodline was also common, ultimately making either wife an equally likely candidate for a child considered his heir. The ruler also had many concubines, though records do seem to agree that Isabel was not the result of any of those unions; some half-siblings who would later come to challenge her status as Moctezuma’s heir were. (Read more.)

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