Friday, March 31, 2023

Jane Austen's Family Home is For Sale


 From Town and Country:

The current Grade II-listed Georgian house sits on 51.64 acres of land and was built in the early 19th century by Jane Austen's older brother, Edward. Jane was born in the original Steventon house, which was located elsewhere on the property, and lived there from 1775 to 1801. Many of Austen's greatest works were written during her time living in Hampshire: Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Northanger Abbey (1817) to name a few. When Jane's father retired from being a village rector for over 40 years, he moved his family to Bath, England.

"Steventon House was the birthplace of iconic author Jane Austen… While the original house no longer stands, what is there today is the glorious Georgian vision of her older brother Edward, which is very befitting of the world that Jane wrote about," Ed Sugden, director of Savills country department said. According to Tatler, Sugden considers the sale as one of the "rarest opportunities to live in one of Hampshire's, if not the United Kingdom's most significant country houses." (Read more.)
The Original House

 

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The Trump Indictment: There is No Coming Back

 From Fox News:

American politics was thrown into complete chaos, perhaps permanently, about three hours ago when a grand jury in Manhattan, one of the most liberal cities in America, a place where 80% voted for Joe Biden in the last election, decided to indict Biden's political opponent in the upcoming election, the Republican front-runner, a man who leads by 30 points in polls, Donald Trump. The jury did this at the urging of a man called Alvin Bragg. He is the Manhattan district attorney who has been famous so far by making the city much more dangerous, by refusing to enforce laws against crimes like robbery and rape...Either way, the net result is Donald Trump is the first former president of the United States ever to be indicted. So, no matter what happens next, we can be certain there is no coming back from this moment. There could be retaliation from red states. The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has already issued a statement saying that he will not participate in any extradition of Donald Trump to New York. That's apparently scheduled for next week. As you can probably tell, we're not certain of the full outlines of the story, but we know this moment is a historic one.(Read more.)

From Breitbart:

Taylor Budowhich, CEO of Make America Great Again Inc, called the news “the indictment of a failed nation” in an emailed statement:

This is not an indictment of a crime—there was no crime—instead, this news is the indictment of a failed nation. President Trump is promising to peacefully end the war in Ukraine, dismantle the deep state, and save our country by putting America first. For that, the political elites and powerbrokers have weaponized government to try and stop him. They will fail. He will be re-elected in the greatest landslide in American history, and together we will all Make America Great Again.

(Read more.)


From Just the News:

Dershowitz said that this case will not stop the 45th president from running for re-election in 2024. 

"It can't prevent him from running, even if he's convicted," he clarified. "And even if he's jailed, the Constitution provides only specific criteria for a president and he meets all the criteria. So he can run. I think Eugene V. Debs ran for president in the 1920s from a prison cell."

Legal experts have derided the case as baseless and Trump's new personal attorney, Joe Tacopina, has asserted that the payment to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen was, in fact, a legitimate legal fee. Read more.)

 

More HERE and HERE.


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Disappearance of the Ninth Legion

 From Explorersweb:

One long-held theory is that the Celts annihilated the Ninth Legion. British author Rosemary Sutcliff played on this theory in her bestselling novel, The Eagle. In this book (and later movie), the Ninth fell victim to the wilderness and native hostility beyond Hadrian’s Wall. German historian Theodor Mommsen had already popularized that theory in the 1800s. He believed the Celts in northern England (particularly the Brigantes) caused the Ninth’s demise.

But despite frequent skirmishes between the Romans and Celts, no supporting physical evidence ever materialized. The only tenuous piece of evidence comes from a vague correspondence between an ancient historian named Fronto and emperor Marcus Aurelius. In their letters, they described the strength of the Celtic forces and how many Roman soldiers lost their lives. Mommsen estimated the Ninth’s destruction at around 118 AD.

In 1866, Reverend J. G Joyce found a 15cm high Roman bronze eagle in Silchester. It dates back to the 1st or 2nd century AD and might have been attached to a larger object like a statue, or carried in procession during campaigns or official activities. An important symbol of the Roman Empire, these eagles were called Aquila. Some researchers believe that this might be the lost eagle of the Ninth Legion. Some scholarship suggests the possibility that the Ninth’s demise led to the construction of Hadrian’s Wall in 122 AD. However, this is purely speculation. (Read more.)
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Thursday, March 30, 2023

Sieur de La Salle


 From 64 Parishes:
La Salle went to France again in 1677 to request permission from the French finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, to search for the mouth of the Mississippi River. Colbert complied by granting La Salle the right to establish forts and trade buffalo hides throughout the Mississippi River Valley in his effort to discover a route to Mexico. While preparing for his return trip to Canada, La Salle met Henri de Tonti, a French soldier who lost his hand in a grenade explosion; Tonti would a play crucial role in La Salle’s future expeditions.

From 1678 to 1681, La Salle prepared for his descent down the Mississippi by exploring the Great Lakes and the Illinois Valley. He constructed a sailing vessel named the Griffon above Niagara Falls. Though he intended to transport furs back to Montreal, the Griffon sank in Lake Michigan before La Salle could make a profit. La Salle also constructed Fort Crèvecoeur on the Illinois River and left Tonti in command, though a group of disgruntled deserters ruined the outpost in 1680. Later that year, La Salle returned to Fort Crèvecoeur with a fresh group of companions and finally reached the Mississippi River for the first time. He chose not to continue to the Gulf of Mexico, however, until he could organize a better-equipped expedition.

In February 1682, La Salle entered the icy waters of the Mississippi River with Tonti and more than forty Europeans and Native Americans in canoes. He named the river Colbert after his financial benefactor in France. Five written accounts of the first voyage down the Mississippi remain: narratives by La Salle, Tonti, the Recollect priest Zénobe Membré, Nicolas de La Salle (unrelated to René-Robert), and Jacques de La Métairie. La Salle halted the expedition near present-day Memphis, Tennessee, and constructed Fort Prudhomme before continuing to the confluence of the Mississippi and Arkansas rivers.

With the assistance of Arkansas guides, La Salle’s entourage reached the point at which the Mississippi River branched into the Gulf of Mexico (near present-day Venice, Louisiana) and planted a post with the inscription “Louis the Great, King of France and of Navarre, Reigns Here, April 9, 1682.” The king would not learn of La Salle’s discovery until a year later. On April 10, without taking the opportunity to explore the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi’s intricate web of tributaries, La Salle began the return voyage up the river to Canada. (Read more.)
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How They Convinced Trump to Lock Down

 From Brownstone Institute:

What changed? Deborah Birx reports in her book that Trump had a friend die in a New York hospital and this is what shifted his opinion. Jared Kushner reports that he simply listened to reason. Mike Pence says he was persuaded that his staff would respect him more. No question (and based on all existing reports) that he found himself surrounded by “trusted advisors” amounting to about 5 or so people (including Mike Pence and Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb)

It was only a week later when Trump issued the edict to close all “indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate,” initiating the biggest regime change in US history that flew in the face of all rights and liberties Americans had previously taken for granted. It was the ultimate in political triangulation: as John F. Kennedy cut taxes, Nixon opened China, and Clinton reformed welfare, Trump shut down the economy he promised to revive. This action confounded critics on all sides. (Read more.)

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The Truth About Audrey Hale

 Candance Owens speaks as a concerned Christian parent in Nashville. The sound on this video does not work for the first couple minutes so fast forward.

 

 More from Candace, here :

   

 From the Daily Wire
A nine-year-old girl who was one of the three schoolchildren gunned down by the Nashville shooter inside a Christian school was desperately trying to stop the massacre by pulling on a fire alarm when she was murdered, according to a report. Evelyn Dieckhaus was eulogized Monday night at a vigil at Woodmont Christian Church, where her older sister, Eleanor, a fifth grader, will soon be baptized

“I don’t want to be an only child,” Eleanor said in a heartbreaking response that moved many to tears. The Dieckhaus family issued a statement lamenting the indescribable loss that occurred inside the Covenant School, a pre-K through 6 school affiliated with Covenant Presbyterian Church. (Read more.)

The Nashville police are being highly commended for their courageous and quick response which no doubt saved many lives. From The Federalist:

Their courage is also a reminder that if Uvalde cops responding to the Robb Elementary school mass shooting last year had shown any urgency or a modicum of bravery, rather than sitting around a parking lot and hallway debating what to do, they likely would have prevented the murders of many, if not all, of the 19 children and two teachers at the school. Recall that one of the officers had a rifle aimed at the shooter before he entered the school but didn’t take the shot because he was awaiting his boss’ permission.

I bring this up because the Uvalde police department is still floating rickety justifications for its cowardice and ineptitude. Last week, Texas Tribune ran a preposterous piece, making the case that cops had been “cowed by the Uvalde shooter’s military-style rifle.” Why, that’s politically convenient, isn’t it? A semi-automatic AR-15, according to the Tribune, drove the decision to wait for Border Patrol SWAT teams to engage the shooter. Not only did the Uvalde officers have a number of their own “assault rifles” and the training to go along with them, but they also possessed shields and other tools to help them. As far as we can tell, some of the Nashville police stormed the school with handguns. Remember also that onlookers, knowing what was happening Robb Elementary, begged the cops to enter the school. Police threatened them with tasers. One of the senior officers would later lie about not knowing children had been shot — when, in reality, a 10-year-old had called 911 warning that there was a classroom “full of victims.” One of the teachers who was shot called her husband, who then tried to get in and save her. He was tackled. Marshals Service deputies drove 70 miles to confront the shooter, and the local cops were still standing around. It wasn’t until off-duty Border Patrol, one who had borrowed a shotgun from his barber, walked past Uvalde police standing in the hallway to enter the classroom that the shooter was neutralized. (Read more.) 

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Ancient Temple with Hieroglyphic Inscriptions Discovered in Sudan

 From Live Science:

Archaeologists have uncovered the remains of a temple dating back around 2,700 years, to a time when a kingdom called Kush ruled over a vast area, including what is now Sudan, Egypt and parts of the Middle East. The temple remains were found at a medieval citadel at Old Dongola, a site located between the third and fourth cataracts of the Nile River in modern-day Sudan. Some of the temple's stone blocks were decorated with figures and hieroglyphic inscriptions. An analysis of the iconography and script suggest that they were part of a structure dating to the first half of the first millennium B.C. The discovery was a surprise, since no finds dating as far back as 2,700 years were known from Old Dongola, archaeologists with the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw said in a statement (opens in new tab). (Read more.)

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Wednesday, March 29, 2023

Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun’s Portraits of Marie Antoinette Sparked Scandal

 

The gown which evoked some disapproval for Marie-Antoinette was not one of the low-cut court gowns (shown above) but the simple white linen dress which she favored for her leisure time at Petit Trianon. The portrait in which she is shown thus had to be withdrawn from the public gaze because people took offense at seeing their Queen painted in casual attire. Now to us, the white dress is perfectly modest, but to people of the eighteenth century, it looked as if she were in her chemise, without the stiff corset prescribed for ladies of the royal family. Furthermore, it was interpreted as being a pro-Austrian picture, since linen came from Flanders, one of the Habsburg territories, and the rose the Queen held was seen as a symbol of the House of Austria.

In order to quell the outrage, Madame Vigée-Lebrun had to quickly come up with another painting. In 1783 the artist completed the portrait above, called "Marie-Antoinette à la rose" showing the Queen appropriately garbed in a silk court gown and headdress, trimmed with lace, ribbons and plumes. She is wearing pearls, as befits a Queen, with hair powdered and face rouged, in accord with court etiquette. She looks as if she has just stepped into her garden on a summer evening, bathed in moonlight. The nocturnal quality of the portrait softens the formality of her attire, alluding to Marie-Antoinette's love of nature, and the fact that she was much more at ease in her gardens than she was in the Hall of Mirrors.

From ArtNet News:

One of the premier artists of her age, and one of very few women artists in the Academy, Vigée Le Brun was invited to show in the 1783 Paris Salon. For the exhibition, the Queen agreed to have her most recent portrait—Marie Antoinette en robe de gaulle (Marie Antoinette in a Chemise Dress)—displayed to the public. The painting depicted the Queen in pastoral attire, donning a muslin cotton dress with a blue sash, a straw hat, and free of jewels.

The dress had been designed by dressmaker Rose Bertin, a popular French designer and a favorite of Queen’s. Bertin, a woman born to modest means, had become a competitively sought-after marchande de modes and was dressmaker to a stylish cohort including Vigée Le Brun herself, as well as the infamous Madame du Barry, the longtime mistress of King Louis XV. Bertin’s styles were often unconventional, sending early shockwaves through more traditional circles.

Though idyllic from a contemporary perspective, Vigée Le Brun’s painting sparked a furor in French society for its perceived lack of dignity. To many, the muslin dress read as bold insult to the public; rather than presenting herself as a regal queen deserving of respect, she attired herself in what many deemed to be her underwear, roleplaying a country girl.

During this era, Marie Antoinette particularly enjoyed spending time at her beloved Petit Trianon, a small château the King had gifted her on the grounds of Versailles, far from the palace and a sanctuary from the court life she deplored. There, the Queen had a functioning dairy, chickens, and other animals, and enjoyed an idyllic, if amusement-park-like, version of country life, and where she dressed informally, in-keeping with Vigée Le Brun’s portrait. (Read more.)

I am not watching the new PBS series about Marie-Antoinette. It is too loaded with inaccuracies for me to enjoy it. But for those interested HERE is an article about where it was filmed.


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The Sloppy Rich

 From Laura Crockett at The History Desk:

During the Middle Ages, folks had to stand still whilst sleeves were tacked onto their garments. Tunics were woven as one piece, but no one had the long fitted sleeves we have today, that are attached to the garment’s body. It would not be until the Renaissance, that the tailor figured out how to make a tight fitting garment. However, clothing was constructed as two pieces; the bodice did not attach to the skirt once hoops came into the picture. The bodice was made to fit the corset. Is it any wonder women stood up straight for the next two hundred years? Even the men’s clothing required stiffness in the construction for those doublets to have the correct look. From this era, the stiff upper body, not just the lip, became the mark of the wealthy. Indeed, the wealthy, who would be the leaders of society, presented themselves as worthy of the roles they played in the civilizations. The people tried to emulate the wealthy.

They still do.

This is what concerns me. That the wealthy no longer understand their role. In part, this is so, because individualism has run amok, and partly because so many new fortunes have been created. Once upon a time, when the same families ruled their civilizations for generations, the middle classes looked to emulate the virtues, and dress, of the leadership class. Whatever the aristocrats were wearing, you wanted to wear it as well. They had style, and the middle and working classes wanted them to have style. Don’t kid yourselves, the working class were some of the biggest snobs around. (Read more.)

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DC Police Officers Acted as Agent Provocateurs on Jan. 6

 From Trending Politics:

Undercover police officers acting as agent provocateurs incited protesters to riot on January 6. The stunning development was uncovered during J6 defendant William Pope’s trial. As reported by the Epoch Times’ Joseph Hanneman, a federal prosecutor “admitted in court papers that three D.C. Metropolitan Police Department undercover officers acted as provocateurs at the northwest steps of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.”

The report cites an admission in a March 24 filing before U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras that sought to keep video footage shot by the officers under court seal. (The document now appears to have been removed.) As noted by the report, “prosecutors accused the case defendant—William Pope of Topeka, Kansas—of an ‘illegitimate’ attempt to unmask the video as part of his alleged strategy to try the case in the news media. Pope filed a motion to remove the court seal on Feb. 21.” (Read more.)

 

Horrible prison conditions for the January 6 prisoners. Also from Trending Politics:

 The Georgia Republican went on to explain that one J6 prisoner is being withheld cancer treatment while in jail. Greene also claimed the doctor in charge of the jail lied to her about the prisoner’s treatment.

“I talked to a pre-trial January 6th Defended yesterday who has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma…He does not receive treatment for his cancer in the DC jail but the doctor in charge at that jail lied to all of us saying oh, no, we provide medical treatment.”

Greene said the Jan. 6 prisoners told her “how they were forced to scrub the jail, clean everything, and paint it all before we came in there” in attempts to appease the congresspeople visiting. Rep. Greene called the conditions “inhumane.” (Read more.)


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The Traditional Use of Fragrant Greenery for Processions

 From Liturgical Arts Journal:

Aside from their appearance, leaves such as these also give off a perfumed like fragrance, especially as they were walked upon. How and why this custom came about is a matter of some speculation, however it is thought to have its origins in antiquity where processions, especially triumphal one's, were frequently accompanied by fragrant leaves such as these. Of course, this tradition also appears at other times other than stational processions in Rome. For example, traditionally on the Feast of Ss. Peter and Paul, the custom was to suspend a large basin of box leaves before the great door of the Vatican basilica. Similarly, for the papal procession of Corpus Christi, the procession was led by the gardeners of the papal palace who would spread out myrtle/mortella along the path of the procession. (Read more.)

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Tuesday, March 28, 2023

Spain and the Hispanic World

 


A new exhibit in London at the Victoria and Albert Museum. From Catholic World Report:

The Victoria and Albert Museum is more inclined to offbeat blockbusters such as “A Brief History of Underwear” (2017) and “Fashioning Masculinities” (2022). Tackling Renaissance sculpture is unusual despite the enthusiasm shown by the founders, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Victoria never went to Rome but was a frequent visitor to Florence. Life-copies of the city’s two most famous statues of David — by Donatello and Michelangelo — were made during her reign. Although Donatello’s sculpture was one of the very few he created that might not have met Victorian standards of modesty, the royal couple was more open-minded than most at the time.

The 19th-century copy of Donatello’s bronze David (circa 1440) is on view at the London show, having been moved from the other side of the museum. The last time the original left Florence was in 1930, accompanied by Benito Mussolini on a publicity mission to the Royal Academy. The Victoria and Albert Museum has instead secured Donatello’s fully clothed version of David (1408), in marble. It is the first work that greets visitors to the show. Created when Donatello was only 22 years old, its carefully composed naturalism sets the scene for the sculptures he made later in his long life.

Taking center stage, after the marble David, is a life-size bronze crucifix by Donatello himself, lent by a church, not a museum. This is part of what makes the exhibition so remarkable. Many of the works would look more appropriate back in their original sacred setting. Most have long since been acquired by museums. Carved forms are something that Catholics are still accustomed to seeing at Mass, unlike Renaissance paintings that once served a pious purpose but for generations have been lining the walls of public galleries. In the case of the Donatello crucifix, it’s displayed between two sculptures in a composition that suggests a reworking of the Calvary spectacle. Taking the place of Dismas and the Impenitent Thief are bronze statues of a bishop and St. George. (Read more.)

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Will Poland Have to 'Enter' Ukraine?

 From Human Events:

Poland’s ambassador to France said that the country would have no choice but to enter the war in Ukraine if the war-torn country ultimately fails to protect itself. Jan Emeryk Rościszewski noted that Ukraine’s potential failure would force Warsaw to engage in military conflict with Russia because the Eastern power would threaten Poland’s "civilization and culture," according to the Daily Mail. Rościszewski went on to say that it "is not NATO, Poland and Slovakia that are mounting ever more pressure, but Russia, which has invaded Ukraine."

"Russia, which is seizing its territories. Russia, which is killing its people. And Russia, which is abducting Ukrainian children."

Rościszewski’s mention of Russia abducting Ukrainian children recently caught the attention of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which has recently called for the arrest of Russian President Vladimir Putin for the war crime of reportedly abducting children and relocating them to re-education camps within Russian borders. Poland’s ambassador to France continued by suggesting that "either Ukraine will defend its independence today, or we will have to enter this conflict." (Read more.)

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Dershowitz on Bragg

 From Conservative Brief:

Attorney Alan Dershowitz believes that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg could be disbarred for his case against former president Donald Trump. He appeared on the Fox News show “Sunday Morning Futures” with host Maria Bartiromo when he said that having Michael Cohen as a witness could damage the district attorney, Mediaite reported. “I don’t think an indictment can actually come forward now after the comments made by [Robert] Costello,” the attorney said. He said that “he has proved that the main witness is going to be a perjuring liar on the witness stand, and that puts the district attorney in a terrible position.”

“If he uses Cohen as a witness, he could actually lose his bar license. It’s unethical to put a witness on the stand who you know is lying, and he has to know that Cohen will be lying. Or he tries the case without Cohen, which would be very difficult, or he does the right thing: he drops the case,” he said. (Read more.)
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The Elven Languages of Middle-Earth

 From The Fantasy Review:

In Tolkien’s works, the elves are depicted as an ancient and sophisticated race, with their own unique languages and cultures. There are several elven languages spoken in Middle-Earth, each with their own grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The most prominent elven language in Middle-Earth is Sindarin, which is spoken by the Grey Elves, or Sindar. It is considered the common tongue of the elves and is the language most frequently spoken in Middle-Earth. Sindarin has a complex grammar system, with different verb forms for different tenses and moods. It also features a rich vocabulary, with words for everything from animals and plants to emotions and abstract concepts. (Read more.)

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Monday, March 27, 2023

Louise Élisabeth of France, Duchess of Parma

 The posthumous portrait by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard of the eldest daughter of Louis XV was painted almost thirty years after her death. It was painted at the request of her younger sisters, the Mesdames. From Marie-Antoinette's Boudoir:

The tremors of romanticism brought to the court a new taste for the past which also infected fashion. The superb dress painted by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard to represent Élisabeth of Parma is totally fancy, of Spanish or Renaissance inspiration to evoke a distant and bygone era. The harmony of tones, the delicacy of execution, and the love for a meticulous description of the textures (from the silk of the dresses, through the lace of the neckline and sleeves, to the feathers of the hat and the parrot perched on the balustrade) make this portrait absolutely admirable. Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, however, delivers here a posthumous portrait of the Duchess of Parma, who died nearly thirty years earlier. (Read more.)

Here is Louise Élisabeth during her lifetime, in hunting garb, by Nattier:


More on the Duchess of Parma, HERE. And HERE.


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The Religious Nature of the City

 From Chad Pecknold at Postliberal Order:

On the hearth of every ancient Greek and Roman home was kept a small, sacred fire. It was the duty of the family to keep it lit night and day. As Fustel de Coulanges argued in his 1864 classic study, “The Ancient City,” on the religious and civil institutions of ancient Greece and Rome, this vesta or “living flame” of the domestic altar was prior to all other devotions to the gods, to such a degree that we might even say that the domestic altar was the common cradle of all natural piety — for the human soul was forged in a family, and the family was itself was a fit home for the rational, relational, and religious nature of man.

The ancients regarded this sacred fire as chaste and pure, as the wellspring of marriage, paternal authority, the happiness of family relations, as well as a fire by which wealth, property and inheritance were blessed. As the family enlarged into other families, expanding associations, and forming a city, it was this same bond of the sacred flame which united all the families, as well as all the principles, rules, laws, institutions, and mores of ancient western civilization. To extend Fustel’s metaphor, we can say that the sacred fire of the hearth should be understood as the city’s most interior altar, integral to both the good of every human person, and the good of every aspect of life together.

Fustel’s point is to show that ancient domestic religion was the constitutive core of the common good of the family, and each family had its own panoply of divinized ancestors and deities. The religion of the sacred fire “caused the family to form a single body, both in this life and the next.” (42) In this way we can understand that the ancient family was primarily a “religious rather than a natural association.” (42) This is not to say that they had no knowledge of the natural law, no knowledge that a family was natural, but that they believed the unity of a family was something more than natural. For example, ancients believed that every member of a family must be initiated into the sacred rites of domestic religion. A natural son would be disowned if he renounced this worship, whereas an adopted son would be counted a real son if he had been initiated into the sacred fire of the family. In this sense, we can see the constitutive hierarchy very clearly.

Again, this is not to say that the family was not natural. It certainly arises from human nature itself, through the union of a man and a woman producing human offspring for which they are responsible. But the natural, temporal conditions for the existence of a family were not sufficient to bind the family together as one. The family was natural, but it was also spiritually tied together by religio, by worship — the common good of the family flowed not from the gene pool but “by the rights of participation in worship.” (42) Yes, they recognized the individual person, but being a person entailed belonging to the family by way of the vesta.

In a similar way, a person also belonged to a City. In his Laws (Bk 5), Plato says that the “kinship” of the city depends on the kinship of the domestic gods. In this sense, the foundation of the city is also not “nature” as such, but worship. As these ancient cities developed, other associative bonds, such as blood, would be admitted -- but nothing was ever as foundational as religion. Even the right of property was an essentially religious idea, for every family required an immovable, stable hearth that belonged to them, that was solely their own. The heart requires soil, a stable foundation upon which to be rested, which can support the sacred fire, and most importantly, unites the family. The walls of a home are raised around religion.

Cicero would recognize the same when he wrote “What is there more holy, what is there more carefully fenced around with every description of religious respect, than the house of each individual citizen? Here is his altar, here is his hearth, here are his household gods; here all his sacred rights, all his religious ceremonies, are preserved.”

The tomb was similarly conceived as something fixed for worship, as the claiming of a space, land, property, which is intelligible for primarily religious reasons. It is thus not only possible to think of religion as the cradle of the family, but of the hearth, the home, the tomb, and yes, the city. Moderns are sometimes puzzled by ancient prohibitions against the sale of land because we fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the ancient city as fundamentally religious. The laws of the hearth were prior to the laws of the city, and those laws were theological through and through. The family was “a little society,” and the fundamental building block of the city. It had a directive principle in the paterfamilias, but it is wrong to think of the family as male-led. The father, like all members of the family, was subordinate to the spiritual power, the sacred fire, the deities of the hearth. The father had rights principally because he had duties, and his chief duty was keeper of the sacred fire along with his wife, who in Roman law was recognized as having equal dignity, if not equal rights, as mater familias precisely because she also was a keeper of the flame, the vesta. Everything about the family was thus conceived as divine to such a degree that the chief virtue of the family was “piety.” The obedience of children to their parents, and the attachment of parents to their children, were regarded as pietas — and so was the love of homeland, or patria. Ulysses longs to see not simply his “country, but “the flame of his hearth-fire,” because the love of one’s homeland is principally religious. As Catholics love the Church, so did the ancients love their homes, and their homeland as bonded together by domestic and civic religion. (Read more.)
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Norse Runes

 From Medievalists:

In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and Norse runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language.

“’Here rests Bishop Peter’ might have been inscribed on a gravestone from the 1200s. Some inscriptions might have been made using runes, others with Roman letters”, says Johan Bollaert, Senior Lecturer at the Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo in Norway. He has investigated written language used in public inscriptions in Norway from the 1100s to the 1500s. Bollaert recently defended his doctoral thesis ‘Visuality and Literacy in the Medieval Epigraphy of Norway’.

The assumption that runes represent a more oral tradition is based on the idea that runic inscriptions are contextually bound and are rarely in Latin – which is associated with a scholarly culture. “But Old Norse can also be written, and it is not written any worse just because it is the vernacular”, says Bollaert.

Another reason for the assumption may be that researchers have compared runic inscriptions with medieval Latin manuscripts. “I think this is wrong, because inscriptions and manuscripts have different forms and functions. A manuscript is often written so that it can be read and understood out of context, i.e. in other places and times. A gravestone, on the other hand, was made to be placed and understood locally”, he explains. “While it is easy to write a sentence or two on parchment, it takes time and effort to carve words into a piece of stone. Therefore, the text used in inscriptions will necessarily be shorter and simpler.” (Read more.)

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Sunday, March 26, 2023

The Murderous Children of 19th Century Britain

 Anyone who has read Dickens is aware that the lot of the poor in Victorian England was dire, in spite of continuous efforts  on the part of both church and state to give aid. While the Industrial Revolution brought many advantages to society in general, such as more efficient transportation, cheaper and plentiful food and personal amenities, the initial transformation of society from agricultural and rural to urban and mechanized caused great upheavals. Family life, religious custom, moral guidelines, were seemingly trampled in the maze of crowded slums of those whose new center of life was the factories where health and safety measures were practically unknown. No laws existed initially to protect children from working all day and so they labored at many jobs all over the country. One would not therefore be surprised at children turning to crime in the cities, like Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger. 

What surprised me about Christina Croft's carefully researched book about child murderers of the nineteenth century were how the children in the countryside seemed as depraved as those in the towns. Little children killing other little children just out of spite, curiosity, or for no apparent reason occurred in idyllic country villages as well as in thriving centers of commerce. Some people blamed the Penny Dreadfuls, which were serialized bloody and lurid tales aimed at a youthful audience, for giving violent ideas to unformed minds. Others blamed the fact that many poor families drank gin or ale when clean drinking water was absent, which it was most of the time. And so it seems many poor children, bereft of an adequate breakfast, were stumbling around intoxicated by mid-morning. In order to feed them, many destitute families sent their children, as soon as they were old enough, to work in service to middle class or wealthy families. It was in respectable and prosperous homes that many of the most infamous murder cases occurred, for the child servants were given the task of watching over the babies of the family. It seems the repressed or suppressed anger of some servant children manifested itself when they were supposed to be caring for helpless infants. England was shocked by such incidents, and the death penalty did not distinguish between adult and child criminals.

Besides willful murder, there were also children who raped other children, as well as children who enjoyed throwing rocks at strangers' heads and seeing them collapse. There were no gun laws regarding children; many curious young boys found it exciting to steal their fathers' firearms but then accidentally shoot innocent passersby or even their friends and family members. Christina Croft has recorded dozens of tragic cases of all varieties of crime which put one more in mind of twenty-first century Baltimore, Maryland than nineteenth century Great Britain. My Beatrix Potter-like visions of Victorian children having rustic tea parties in the garden along with bunnies, dolls and hedgehogs have been smashed forever.

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On the Signature Bank Fiasco

 From The Post Millennial:

Regulators shut down New York City based Signature Bank on Sunday, a financial institution which had previously cut ties with President Donald Trump following the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Signature Bank is the second financial institution shuttered by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) this week after Friday's collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. According to CNBC, "Signature is one of the main banks to the cryptocurrency industry. As of Dec. 31, Signature had $110.4 billion in total assets and $88.6 billion in total deposits, according to a securities filing."

On January 12, 2021, the bank told The New York Post that it had begun the process of closing Trump’s two personal accounts and “will not do business in the future with any members of Congress who voted to disregard the Electoral College.” According to the outlet, Signature also posted a “scathing statement” on its website slamming Trump stating, “We have never before commented on any political matter and hope to never do so again.” (Read more.)

 

From Brownstone Institute:

Indeed, notwithstanding all the Mickey Mouse aspects of the SIFI capital standards regime, it might well be wondered whether Signature and SVB would still be open today had they needed to adhere to JP Morgan levels of capital and liquidity, but one thing is certain: Getting the benefits of a posthumous SIFI designation that they were never required to adhere to while they were still among the living is a new low in Washington servility to the powerful. In this case, the billionaire overlords of Silicon Valley and the VC racket whose deposits were at risk until about 6PM Sunday night.

And yet, and yet. The grotesque bailout of the large depositors who wear the Big Boy Pants at these institutions is just the tip-of-the-iceberg of the outrage warranted by this weekend’s pitiful capitulation.

It apparently became evident even to the brain-dead zombies who run the triumvirate in Washington that bailing out all SVB and Signature Bank depositors would trigger a massive run on deposits at other “small” banks—and for that matter most any non-SIFI institution. So they extended the bailout to the entire $18 billion universe of US bank deposits, more than $9 trillion of which are not covered by the existing $250,000 FDIC insurance limit.

And pray tell what lighting enactment of a Congress which was not even in session over the weekend, or prior enactment that no one on earth ever heard of, was this sweeping commitment of taxpayer funds based on?

The true answer is essentially institutional arrogance. Technically, the new Bank Term Funding Program (BTFP) was invoked under the Fed’s emergency authorities to handle “unusual and exigent circumstances” by cranking up its printing presses. But this new addition to the alphabet soup of facilities first stood up during the 2008-2009 crisis is just plain over the top.

It will allow banks to borrow 100 cents on the dollar against the book or par value of trillions of UST and Agency debt on their balance sheets. Yet much of it is massively underwater owing to the fact that at long last the yields on fixed income securities are being allowed to normalize. And unlike normal free market practice, BTFP users won’t even have to over-collaterize their loans.

Accordingly, this is a huge gift to banks which were sitting on some $620 billion in unrealized losses on all securities (both Available for Sale and Held to Maturity) at the end of last year, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. It also means that just the Big 4 banks—as shown in the second chart below—are getting a $210 billion bailout. (Read more.)


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Harriet Tubman: A Story Told Through Landscape

 From Mahan Rykiel:

The subject of a 2019 Hollywood film and new statue in the Maryland Capitol, Harriet Tubman began her life and incredible story on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She was born into slavery and later escaped and helped others gain their freedom as a “conductor” of the Underground Railroad. Tubman also served as a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War; she is considered the first African-American woman to serve in the military. Her life and legacy are influenced deeply by the landscape and communities in which she was raised, enslaved, and worked. In 2013, 100 years after Tubman’s death, the State of Maryland and the National Park Service broke ground for a new protected area within the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge. This 17-acre state-owned site lay entirely within the refuge’s boundaries on Maryland Route 335. The state designated the land and honored Tubman’s legacy with the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park. On the same date, the State of Maryland unveiled the 125-mile Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Scenic Byway, a route along an existing system of county, state, and federal roads which mirrored the route Tubman took while rescuing slaves.

The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad State Park and Visitor Center invites visitors to experience Tubman’s world through exhibits that are informative and emotive, providing an in-depth understanding of Tubman’s early years spent in Maryland’s Choptank River region and her legacy as a leader in the resistance movement of the Underground Railroad. The park, which sits on the trailhead for the 125‐mile Byway, interprets how the landscape of the Choptank River region shaped her early years and the importance of her faith, family and community.

“The core of the Tubman interpretive experience is rooted in the physical geography and topography of the fields, forests, paths, and waterways of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. These landscapes are physical and material, on the one hand, and intangible and nonphysical on the other…. Rooting visitors in these places, such as her birth site at the Thompson plantation at Harrisville, the fields and woods of the Brodess farm and Bucktown, the forests, fields, wharves and creeks of Madison, the rivers and streams of Blackwater and the Choptank River estuary, and the Underground Railroad routes through Caroline County, can help visitors visualize the breadth and scope of the physical and social landscapes of Tubman’s life.” (Larson, 2014)

(Read more.)


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Saturday, March 25, 2023

“O Jewel Resplendent”

From MDPI:

St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) comes down to us as one of the most dynamic intellectual figures of the twelfth century. As a leader of religious women in the Rhineland, she authored extensive volumes of visionary theology; designed visual images for at least one of those; composed the largest corpus of liturgical music ascribed to a single author of the Middle Ages; wrote works in natural science and medicine; preached to religious communities throughout her region; and engaged in an extensive correspondence with people from all ranks of society, from popes and kings down to local monks and nuns. This extraordinary, interconnected body of work offers us a unique entry point into medieval intellectual life, at once rooted in tradition and recasting that tradition in startlingly innovative ways. Hildegard’s Mariology exemplifies this creative range.
 
The best overview of Hildegard’s “theology of the feminine” remains the foundational work of Newman (1997). She demonstrated that for Hildegard, the feminine can be understood at a cosmic level as the matrix for the manifestation of divinity into time. The Virgin Mary is the most concentrated focal point of a dynamic that stretches from the figure of eternal Wisdom ordering creation, through the fertile but fallen mother Eve, and then on to the Virgin Mother Church. Essential elements in this Mariology include the predestination of the Virgin (i.e., that God preordained from eternity that the Virgin would bear his Son); Mary’s restoration of Eve’s fallenness through the power of virginity; and the Virgin’s exemplarity for Ecclesia, the Church, who is a Mother to the faithful in baptism and bears for them the Body of Christ in the Eucharist.1
Most studies of Hildegard’s Mariology find their richest sources in her lyrics. She composed more liturgical music for the Virgin Mary than she did for any other single subject: sixteen pieces that survive with musical notation (including antiphons, responsories, a sequence, a song, an Alleluia verse, and a hymn), as well as several others that survive only in a textual miscellany (Hildegard of Bingen 1998). There is good reason for this: Hildegard’s thought reaches its densest and most sublime in her liturgical poetry, which summarizes her larger theological project. Hildegard’s music thus provides an entry point for exploring the deeper roots of her Mariology, not only through manifest images of the Virgin but also through what Denk (2021) has called “Mariological allusion.” Essentially, we can learn even more about Hildegard’s views on the Virgin Mary by tracing allusions, analogues, and motifs that make the Virgin present even in the absence of explicit invocations. Denk (2021) has done this principally through musicological allusions to the wider chant repertoire, a valuable line of inquiry pioneered in recent years by Bain (2021).
 
This study, too, will take two of Hildegard’s musical compositions for the Virgin as its springboard: the antiphon, O splendidissima gemma; and the responsory, O tu suavissima virga. The context in which we will explore their allusive power, however, will be the treatise in which Hildegard embedded them: her first work, Scivias, written 1142–1151. This book (whose title is shorthand for “Know the Ways of the Lord”) consists of twenty-six visions organized into three parts and serves as a kind of summa or “summary” of Christian theology. The first part surveys the order of creation and its fall, both of Lucifer and the angels and of humans in Adam and Eve. The second part articulates the order of redemption, with a focus on the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the sacraments of the Church. The third part, finally, dramatically retells the stories of the first two by setting them within a vast “Edifice of Salvation,” with the Virtues as our guide through salvation history and into eternity.
This study of Hildegard’s Scivias will proceed not only from its text,2 but also from its illustrations and music. Hildegard designed a detailed cycle of illustrations for a copy of Scivias produced in her monastery during the final decade of her life, which I will refer to as the Rupertsberg Scivias.3 Although no extant copies of Scivias include musical notation for the song cycle in the work’s final vision, the notation does survive in copies of Hildegard’s music in two other manuscripts.4 As Fassler (2022) has recently argued, Hildegard certainly intended that her nuns would know both the illustrations and the music when they engaged with the treatise.5 Meanwhile, as I have argued elsewhere (Campbell 2013, 2021), the illustrations produced about two decades later function as teaching tools to refine and highlight certain aspects of the text. Interpretation of the work is dynamically strongest when it attends to all three of its modes of communication: textual, musical, and visual.
 
Previous studies of the Virgin Mary’s place in Scivias have focused on the contrast with Eve (Garber 1998) and the place of the Annunciation as a model for authorizing female inspiration (Wain 2017). Wain (2017) offers a valuable critique of the ways in which many discussions of medieval Mariology rely too simplistically on the “Eva/Ave” trope to set up an oppositional parallel between Eve and Mary. She suggests that Hildegard instead sees the Virgin Mary as a model for her own intellectual fertility, positing the opening illustration of the Rupertsberg Scivias (which accompanies Hildegard’s preliminary Protestificatio) as an adapted Annunciation scene, with Hildegard gestating and giving birth to the work. Garber (1998), meanwhile, draws together the architectural metaphors found in several of Hildegard’s Marian lyrics with the imagery of the edifice of salvation in Part 3 of Scivias to suggest that Hildegard and her nuns shared with the Virgin a role as builders, not only of the physical monastery that they renewed at the Rupertsberg, but also of the life of monastic virtue. She contrasts the symbolic abstraction of Eve and Mary in much of Scivias with the more physically concrete personifications of the Virtues, who thus offer more relatable role models for Hildegard’s nuns.
The salient historiographical issue is the extent to which the Virgin Mary could serve as a viable role model for medieval women. It is sometimes suggested that she could displace the gross misogyny that often resulted from the identification of women as “daughters of Eve.” But how realistic would that displacement be if we recognize that the Virgin Mary was in many ways “an inaccessible paragon” (Wain 2017, p. 164)? In Hildegard’s hands especially, the Virgin takes on cosmic proportions. We do not find Hildegard meditating on the humanly relatable aspects of the Virgin’s life, such as her compassion or sorrow for her Son, that would become powerful models in later medieval spirituality. Instead, as we will see in this study, Mary appears as “majestic and impersonal” (Newman 1997, p. 166), a radiant light shining distantly, blinding in its brilliance like the sun. But this study will also show that Hildegard mediated the Virgin’s light through analogues of traditional Marian imagery. Building on the insights of Garber (1998) and Fassler (2022), it will reveal how the Virgin exemplifies the life of the virtues and through them could indeed serve as a model for Hildegard and the virgin nuns under her care. Again, in contrast to later medieval spiritual practices that encouraged interior meditation on details of the Virgin’s life—even when those details, such as her reading at the Annunciation,6 could authorize women’s learning and intellectual life—Hildegard’s focus for her nuns was on actively developing virtues that for her imitate the Virgin’s key role in salvation history. When her nuns would join their voices in the music of the liturgy, in particular, they would be transformed into resplendent gems, “living stones” to build up the heavenly Jerusalem and take their place as the perfected work of the Church. (Read more.)


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So Much for Transparency

 From American Greatness:

The Left and NeverTrump Right spent four years claiming “democracy dies in darkness” while extolling the virtues of resistance and transparency. Thus, their extreme overreaction to Tucker Carlson’s acquisition and release of raw video footage from the January 6, 2021 Capitol protests is startling and a bit tin-eared. The leadership basically are saying: “Who you gonna believe, us or your lying eyes?” 

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) condemned Carlson as an enemy of the people and seemed to imply something bad would happen to Fox News for permitting the dissemination of videos of the January 6 protests. Schumer, and pretty much all of Carlson’s other critics, never explain why what happened on January 6 should be hidden from the American people, and they never assert the videos being shown are doctored, fake, or inauthentic.

Critics can call this release a lie all they want, but the footage doesn’t lie. In fact, compared to the cherry-picked material already in the public domain, the broader record undermines some of the key narratives Democrats have concocted. For example, Officer Brian Sicknick is seen walking around, apparently in perfect health, after his supposed murder. An alleged violent insurrectionist, the QAnon Shaman, appears being led calmly from door to door by helpful Capitol Police

Carlson’s critics from both wings of the uniparty seemed to think they could keep a lid on reality and use their extravagant and overwrought rhetoric about an INSURRECTION to reinforce their false narrative. No such luck. This fragile edifice was already starting to crack before Carlson’s exposé. 

Before Carlson, there had been many videos circulating showing grandmas politely and respectfully walking through the capitol, and American Greatness’ Julie Kelly earlier exposed the two-tiered justice system defendants have faced for what are mostly minor offenses. (Read more.)


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Joe Biden: Guilty Of Foul Deeds

 From David Horowitz at American Greatness:

This first Biden bank record to be surrendered showed three members of the Biden family, including Beau Biden’s widow Hallie and one person identified only as “Biden,” received payments amounting to $1 million from a Chinese Communist State energy company. 

What were the payments for? Forget asking the Bidens, who have a long history of silence and denial on such material questions. When asked, Joe Biden denied he ever discussed Hunter Biden’s Chinese business affairs with him, even though he flew with Hunter on Air Force Two to China and met with his business associates. Never at a loss for brazen lies to extricate himself from difficult circumstances, Biden, without a second thought, denied that the bank records were “true.” 

To date, there hasn’t been one attempt by the Biden camp to try to explain what service the Bidens actually supplied to the Chinese Communists to earn such ample rewards. At the lowest levels of this corruption, Hallie Biden, who is a school counselor, received $25,000 from the Chinese Communist Party. For what?

When you have no answers to such material questions, when you lie continually about the operations themselves (“I never discussed Hunter’s business with my son!”) when you suborn your intelligence services to carry out an elaborate and expensive effort to suppress the story of an incriminating laptop, and do it right before a presidential election, you are in fact telling us that you are guilty of the obvious crime you are covering up. In this case, treason: colluding with an enemy power to hurt your own country.

Consider the simple fact that though pieces of this story have become objects of public concern over the last half dozen years, the Biden camp has constructed no narrative to provide a plausible explanation of these extraordinary payoffs from the Chinese Communist dictatorship; in other words, no effort has been made to provide an alternative explanation to the apparent one of personal greed and national betrayal.

I ask readers to put themselves in the position of the president. You are taking massive payments from a government that deliberately sent millions of its subjects from the Wuhan center of a deadly pandemic to countries around the world to celebrate the Lunar New Year. This criminal action resulted in the deaths of 9 million people globally, including a million Americans. You then backed this same criminal dictatorship’s efforts to cover up the origins of that outbreak in a Chinese Communist military lab which was running “gain of function” research, paid for by your government, on the deadly virus at the heart of said pandemic.

At the same time, the dictatorship from which you were receiving payments making your family rich beyond its wildest dreams was organizing alliances with America’s deadly enemies, Russia and Iran. And thanks to your deliberate destruction of America’s southern border, which effectively put its control in the hands of Mexico’s drug cartels, you created a new mortal threat to the safety of American citizens in the form of a new drug—fentanyl—which is produced by the Chinese Communists and distributed to Americans by the Mexicans. 

The annual death toll from fentanyl poisoning among Americans now equals the annual death toll of American soldiers in World War II. But Biden has made no effort to deter the Chinese from poisoning American citizens by, for example, ending the subsidies we provide to their economy or revoking China’s Most Favored Nation trade status, or closing all the Confucius Institutes ensconced at our universities and designed to steal our technologies. From the Chinese Communist point of view, this alone would be worth the tens of millions of dollars they have poured into the Bidens’ pockets. (Read more.)


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A Century-Old Trout Hatchery in Virginia Is Making Waves

 From Garden and Gun:

Ty Walker is up to his ears in trout. From his home in New Castle, Virginia, Walker raises thousands of rainbow trout on a nearly hundred-year-old hatchery situated on a mountain spring. The hatchery, built in the 1930s by the federal government, still operates the way it always has, relying on gravity and an abundant supply of limestone-filtered water to fill the raceways and ponds where the fish grow to maturity. In 2022, Walker estimates that he and his brother-in-law, Matthew, processed around eight thousand trout by hand, cleaning, gutting, and packing the fish before they could be sold. This year, the trout count is up to twenty thousand, and Walker is committed to putting them front and center (and whole) on plates around the state of Virginia. His hatchery, called Smoke in Chimneys, sells to chefs, as well as by mail-order online. “Our goal is to make eating a whole trout right up there with shucking oysters or picking crabs,” Walker explains. “Eating whole trout should be in that sphere, but the barrier to entry is like walking into a cigar shop and not knowing anything about cigars. You already feel like an idiot.” Walker wants to change that, and he hopes that people will be willing to learn about the beauties of eating the state fish, grown in its home state, with a little help from some of Virginia’s best chefs. (Read more.)

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Friday, March 24, 2023

Four Table-Styling Tips

 

From Victoria:

Texas-based tastemaker Nicola Bathie McLaughlin is a household name to those who long to fill their dressing rooms with sparkling bespoke gems and elegant fashions. The interior designer–turned–jewelry designer creates necklaces, earrings, and other baubles for her namesake brand, Nicola Bathie Jewelry, and has collaborated with notable clothier Antonio Melani for a Dillard’s clothing line. Her impeccable sense of style reaches well into her San Antonio home, featured in our March/April 2023 issue, where she entertains family and friends. Exclusively for Victoria, Nicola shares four tips for creating beautiful tableaux. With connections to England and a love of antiques, Nicola’s china collections embrace a distinct European elegance. A combination of blue-and-white plates become a unique work of art on her dining room wall and complement the ruffled gingham covering on the table. “Don’t be afraid to layer,” says Nicola. Salmon-shaded placemats from Mrs. Alice offer a charming contrast to the cool tones of the cloth underneath, while etched crystal goblets and Herend plates in the Queen Victoria pattern provide even more pattern play on the surface. (Read more.)


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Southern Poverty Law Official Worked for Communist Front

 From Catholicism:

Conservative media platforms have been reporting the arrest of a staff attorney for the Southern Poverty Law Center— Thomas Webb Jurgens — who participated in a violent Antifa attack on a police and fire training center outside of Atlanta.

On March 5th, armed and black clad Antifa anarchists invaded the Atlanta Public Safety Training Facility in South River Forest, Georgia, setting fires, destroying construction equipment, and hurling rocks, bricks, fireworks and Molotov cocktails at police officers.

Thirty-five individuals were arrested in connection with the attack. Twenty-three, including Jurgens, were charged with domestic terrorism.

The arson, vandalism, and assaults on police came less than a month after the leak of a memo from the Virginia office of the FBI, targeting traditional Catholics as violent extremists, which cited the Southern Poverty Law Center as its source.

The Soros funded SPLC has now defended Jurgens, claiming that he was acting as a “legal observer” for the National Lawyers Guild. Largely overlooked in this controversy, is the fact that the National Lawyers Guild has long been identified as a front group for the Communist Party, USA.

The House Un-American Activities Committee once described the NLG as the “foremost legal bulwark of the Communist Party,” an assessment shared by U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell.

Catholic Action League Executive Director C. J. Doyle made the following comment: “The SPLC has a long, mendacious and disreputable history of demonizing social conservatives and traditional Catholics as extremists who belong to ‘hate groups.'”

“Now we find that one of the SPLC’s attorneys, Thomas Jurgens, participated in a terrorist attack by an actual extremist group — Antifa — which has an extensive record of destructive acts of criminal violence.”

“Moreover, this SPLC official collaborated with Antifa on behalf of another extremist organization — the NLG — which is affiliated with the Communist Party, undoubtedly the most murderous hate group in human history.”

“The SPLC is a lucrative bunco scheme which monetizes left wing paranoia by inciting fear of conservative Christians. As of the end of fiscal 2021, its total assets exceeded $800 million, while its annual income was north of $130 million.” (Read more.)


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