The Death of Richard III

From Medievalists:

On 22 August 1485 Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England was killed at the Battle of Bosworth. Exactly how and who carried out the killing remains shrouded in mystery. Having seen his battle line collapsing under the French flank attack, Richard charged Henry Tudor and his bodyguard. He immediately killed William Brandon, Henry’s standard bearer. The standard crashed to the ground only to be picked up, according to Welsh tradition, by Rhys ap Maredudd (Rhys Fawr).

Henry must have been close, because we are told by Vergil that next in Richard’s path was the 6 foot 8 inch John Cheyney. with great force drove him to the ground. Vergil tells us that at this moment ‘Henry abode the brunt longer than ever his owne soldiers wold have wenyd, who wer now almost owt of hope of victory.’ Holinshed says that Richard was no more than a sword point away from Henry, and Michael Drayton in his poem says they were ‘scarce a lance length’ apart. Victory was now within Richard’s grasp. (Read more.)

 More on Richard III: HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

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Manipulated Polls

 From The Enterprise:

A $20 bill that a bank teller miscounts is still a $20 bill. A $20 bill printed in a basement is something else. Median Strategies appears to have done the second thing to two elections in one week, inventing the voters, the interviews, the methodology, and the results, then posting the product under a corporate-sounding name the day before Wisconsin Democrats chose a nominee for governor. Calling the stunt a "social experiment" after it was exposed does not convert attempted election fraud into political science.

On August 10, one day before Wisconsin's Democratic gubernatorial primary, an anonymous shop calling itself Median Strategies published a supposed survey putting Francesca Hong at 46.3% and David Crowley at 22.6%. The release came with a sample, field dates, a methodology statement, and a name that sounded like one you might already have heard of. Someone reading it on a phone the night before the primary would have seen the ordinary furniture of a real poll and had no reason, from the face of the document, to treat it as fiction. The poll did not exist.

Crowley won the August 11 primary 39.8% to Hong's 39.3%, a margin of 3,796 votes. Median had overstated Hong's advantage by more than 24 points. That gap is not a polling miss, because no voters were interviewed and no sample was ever in the field.

Median did not confess when the returns came in. On August 12, it behaved like a legitimate firm that had simply gotten Wisconsin wrong "by quite a margin," the kind of rueful note a real shop posts after a blowup, the kind of note that keeps the brand intact for whatever it planned to publish next. The next release arrived the following day. (Read more.)

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Death of the Great God Pan

 From The Greek Reporter:

One of the strangest stories to survive from the ancient world of the Greeks tells of a mysterious voice heard across the sea announcing something almost unthinkable. According to the voice, the Greek god Pan was dead.

The story was recorded by the Greek philosopher and historian Plutarch in his work On the Obsolescence of Oracles, written during the Roman period. Rather than recounting a familiar myth about a god battling monsters or interfering in human affairs, Plutarch presented the episode almost like a contemporary report. He included named witnesses, specific geographical locations, and even an investigation allegedly ordered by the Roman emperor.

The story raises an enduring mystery about what Plutarch believed had happened and why the death of Pan would have been considered such a remarkable event. It also offers a glimpse into how ancient Greeks understood their gods, oracles, and the changing religious world around them. (Read more.)

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The Callisto

 

I am fascinated by tiny houses. From Autoevolution:

Callisto is a single-level tiny house, and within its 320 square feet (29.7 square meters) of floorspace (400 square feet/37 square meters for the 40-foot-long version), you get a spacious living room, a well-equipped kitchen with a separate kitchen island, a full bathroom, and a private bedroom. Everything is on the ground level, offering the comfort and accessibility many are looking for.

This home features two matching entry doors that flank the living space, creating a balanced and symmetrical layout. The main entrance door on the left opens directly into the kitchen, while the secondary glass door across the room breaks up the wall space in the living area, seamlessly connecting the lounge and dining area to the outside.

The central kitchen is cleverly split into highly functional parallel workstations that optimize the use of space and increase functionality. On one side, a linear row of base and upper cabinets forms the main cooking area, with generous counter space, a built-in range, a microwave, and a full-size stainless steel fridge. (Read more.)

 

 

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Democrats’ Southern Strategy

 From Daniel McCarthy from Chronicles:

Don’t believe the Democratic National Committee’s official storyline—the DNC’s decision to make South Carolina the first Democratic presidential primary in 2028 isn’t about introducing more racial diversity into the early contests. It’s actually about keeping power in the hands of the party establishment, the people who backed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020, and who are likely to wind up supporting Kamala Harris in 2028.

The fix is in.

South Carolina was the establishment’s firewall against Bernie Sanders’ left-wing insurgency twice over. In 2016, Sanders nearly beat Hillary Clinton in the first caucus, in Iowa, and went on to defeat her in the New Hampshire primary. Four years later, there was a brief moment when Sanders looked like the frontrunner—until he got clobbered by Joe Biden in South Carolina.

It’s true that the black voters who make South Carolina’s primaries more racially diverse than the contests in Iowa or New Hampshire are also less politically radical, so it’s easy for the DNC to say it’s not trying to choke off support for the socialist wing of the party, it’s just giving black voters more of a say.

The Democratic Socialists of America, the left fringe of the party, is disproportionately white—even its New York City chapter is 60 percent white, according to DSA’s own membership polling.

That’s astonishing considering NYC itself is only 34 percent white.

This racial split between the Democrats’ most ideologically intense faction and the party’s elite, which only holds onto power thanks to black voters’ loyalty, is a fault line with the potential to reshape American politics. (Read more.)

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Jason Arday and Jesus the Vulnerable God

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

Jason Arday was an academic at Cambridge who got exposed for lying about his past and plagiarizing his papers. Some conservatives are blaming Arday’s death on DEI, while the left says he was undone by racism. While it is important that frauds get called to account, it’s also possible to recognize that the “shame storm” of modern witch hunts can also be too much for some people to bear — and that sometimes the shame storm is out of proportion to the actual crime. (Some shame storms are also entirely created by the media.) 

    While everyone has been dissecting Arday’s academic career and past, I kept thinking of him in those last moments when he decided to take his own life. When he fell terrified and abandoned. He deserved the blowback from his actions, but did not deserve to die. There is a way through these valleys, although suicidal ideation is a hard cross to bear. And the frenzy of commentary following Arday's death is a little too gleeful. Perhaps the wisdom of Pat Buchanan should apply here: “When God puts his hand on a man, I take mine off.”

 The journalist Helen Andrews called the phenomenon of the media swarming a target a “shame storm.” In 2019 Andrews was publicly embarrassed on television when an old boyfriend began insulting her about how their relationship ended. Her shame was debilitating: “Everyone at work was supportive, but no amount of support could counteract the paranoia that settled in over the next weeks and months. My colleagues probably didn’t believe the woman they worked alongside was secretly a comic-book ­villain—but surely the suspicion had been planted? I never knew whether someone on the subway was giving me a second glance because he knew me, or because he recognized me from the video. Fellow journalists reported back to me from conferences where [my ex-boyfriend] Todd expatiated on my depravity at length—in one case, before an audience that included my boss.” (Read more.)

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What Does Marie-Antoinette Mean to Us Now?

 

Posthumous portrait of the Queen by Madame Lebrun

Many people are disgusted by the depiction of Marie-Antoinette in the BBC series. My piece for Catholic Answers:

I first visited Marie-Antoinette’s private retreat at Petit Trianon when I was seventeen years old. It was January, but the birds were singing in the gardens. Then and on successive trips, I experienced a strong sense of timelessness. Others have confided to me a similar feeling of enchantment when wandering through the gardens of Trianon.

People frequently ask me why I write about Marie-Antoinette. One of the reasons is that I keep encountering educated people who really think she said, “Let them eat cake.” I continue to encounter Christians who think Marie-Antoinette was killed as punishment for some egregious wickedness or, at least, for unforgivable stupidity. Having read books about her since childhood, I knew she was misunderstood; it was only after a great deal more research that I came to see how completely false are the common beliefs about her.

But the demonization of Marie-Antoinette in the popular mind is necessary to justify the excesses of the French Revolution. When people have a false and distorted view of history, it is difficult for them to grasp the present, and almost impossible to meet the future with any kind of preparedness.

The French Revolution was not necessary, simply because it is never necessary to murder tens of thousands of people. Reform certainly was needed, but reform can happen without mass murder.

Louis XVI was an intrepid reformer. He was not afraid to break with the past and abolish outdated customs while introducing new ways of doing things. Louis was not resistant to change, although that is how he is usually portrayed. The changes were slow but over time might have been effective, had the violent upheavals not swept everything away.

Too often, the violence is represented as a sad but unavoidable means of achieving freedom and democracy. But it is not only that the French Revolution overturned the social order; it was ultimately an attack on the Catholic Church. Many Catholics were killed, especially those peasants who did not want their religion taken away.

The French Revolution has been the blueprint for every totalitarian regime that has followed and has continued to be the model for those wishing not only to destroy the Catholic Church, but all Christian society. (Read more.)

The portrait above was painted posthumously by Madame Lebrun. Here is a letter from Marie-Thérèse Charlotte to the artist, who was a friend of the family:

 A letter written by Marie-Thérèse Charlotte to Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun on April 15th, 1800, regarding a portrait of Marie Antoinette, which was given to Marie-Thérèse by the comte de Cossé. The duchesse wrote that he gave her…

“…the portrait of my Mother that you had charged him to bring me. You give me the double satisfaction of seeing in a more beautiful work an image very dear to my heart. Judge therefore how grateful I am to you for having used your rare talents to give me this proof of your feelings and be convinced that I am more sensitive to it than I can express to you. You can count equally, Madame, on my feelings for you.”

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How Beijing Laundered $230 Billion in Exports

 From The Enterprise:

Consider a homeowner who installs a good deadbolt on his front door. A month later, he checks his records and finds that no one has forced the front door since the day the lock was installed. He also finds that his television is gone. The lock worked exactly as designed, which is why the thief stopped using the door. What the homeowner needs is not a better lock but a survey of his windows.

In 2018, President Trump used Section 301 to put a real tariff rate on Chinese goods, a price an importer had to actually pay at the border rather than a figure riddled with carve-outs. Chinese exporters responded, as any rational party would, to the price by looking for a cheaper route. They found one, and the route ran through Mexico, Vietnam, Malaysia, and a few dozen other jurisdictions willing to sell a stitch, a stamp, and a certificate of origin.

On Thursday, the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, Peter Navarro’s shop, published a 25-page report called

The Great Transshipment Scam

. The language was blunt enough that even the Associated Press could not soften it into a story about supply chain diversification. The report describes a global architecture built for one purpose, a lattice of free trade zones, bonded warehouses, processing corridors, and re-export centers. It says plainly that the rerouting “made it look like US imports from China had dropped” while Beijing kept the factories, the workers, the tooling, and the profits. Navarro’s own summary was less clinical. For years, he said, the great transshipment scam has let communist China launder its exports. (Read more.)

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Homebuyers Deserve the Facts About Crime and Schools

 From Chronicles:

Nothing is more natural when buying a house than looking into how safe the neighborhood is, and, if you have or plan to have children, whether the schools are any good.

Yet the last Democratic presidential administration tried to prevent real estate agents from answering those kinds of questions because it prioritized “diversity” over safety and education. The Trump administration revoked the de facto gag rule this year, but the damage the Biden administration inflicted is still being felt.

What’s worse, state regulations in New York and elsewhere still prevent real estate agents from speaking freely to homebuyers about crime and schools.

Interfering with homebuyers was a first-week priority for the Biden administration: Six days after he was sworn into office, Joe Biden issued his directive establishing enforcement priorities for the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would scare real estate agents into remaining silent on two of the subjects most important to their clients.

“Diverse and inclusive communities strengthen our democracy,” the executive memorandum began. What mom or dad wants their community to be “inclusive” of failing schools? Who wants diversity to mean mixing criminals with innocent people?

Black families don’t want to live in dangerous or educationally dead-end neighborhoods any more than people of any other color do. (Read more.)

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