Portrait of Mary I

 From ArtNet:

A miniature painting of a woman long been believed to be Katherine Parr, Henry’s sixth wife who managed to survive the curse of his courtship, may actually be Mary Tudor, Henry’s first daughter who is better known today as “Bloody Mary.” According to art historian Emma Rutherford, it’s all in the nose. 

“Mary’s nose, frankly, was rather bulbous and upturned, while Parr’s was more aquiline,” she told the Guardian. “Both Mary and Katherine had reddish hair and blueish eyes, and were a similar age of around 30 when this miniature was done. Hence some confusion. They wore similar clothes too, though Parr’s were usually more dressy. But the noses are clearly different.”

Rutherford began studying the work while putting together the exhibition “The Reflected Self: Portrait Miniatures” at Compton Verney House, about 100 miles northwest of London, until February 23, 2025. She initially made comparisons with other portraits of the two women. Parr’s preeminent portrait is Master John’s full length painting at London’s National Portrait Gallery. The best known of Mary, painted in the 1550s while she was queen, is by Antonis Mor in Madrid’ Prado museum; another by Hans Eworth is also in London’s Portrait Gallery.

Her observations about both women’s noses led her to seek more evidence and her claim was soon backed up by Tudor jewelry expert Nicola Tallis. Tallis noted that the sitter in the miniature painting is wearing a cross with black diamonds that matches a necklace described in Mary’s expenses records. Henry VIII gave it to his daughter in 1546, the same year that the portrait was likely painted, Rutherford believes. It was very likely by Susanna Horenbout, the first known female artist in England and a friend of Mary. The portrait may even have been commissioned by Parr, who was a strong advocate for both Mary and her half-sister Elizabeth’s interests at court. (Read more.)

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Credible Scientific Evidence

 From Sharyl Attkisson:

The propagandists have important connections and plenty of money to spend to wield influence, as they long have, with federal agencies, members of Congress, and in media. They support fake “fact check” groups like Health Feedback and Science Feedback, dominate social media narratives, provide “journalism resources” that give false information, control medical information distributed by our once-esteemed public health agencies, influence medical associations, and back nonprofits that are designed to sound independent but put out industry misinformation.

They have proven they will go to any lengths to protect their billion dollar profits and to try to stop any disruption of the corrupt medical establishment built to support them. Below is a summary of some helpful information on links between vaccines and autism, with a few examples and links. Read on for details. (Read more.)

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Bologna’s Extremely Tall Medieval Towers

 From The Mind Circle:

It’s surprising to learn but Bologna had skyscraper-like extremely tall towers in the medieval period. It is thought that there were about 180 towers in Bologna between the 12th and the 13th century. One of the tallest ones was 320 feet (97 meters) high, which is still standing today. The main aim, while constructing those towers, was to construct strong defensive buildings. Besides the towers, there are still some fortified gateways that correspond to the gates of the 12th-century city wall.

The first historian to study the skyscrapers of Bologna in a systematic way was Count Giovanni Gozzadini. He was a senator of the Italian kingdom who lived in the 19th century and wanted to raise the prestige of his hometown. Analyzing the civic archives of real estate deeds, Gozzadini attempted to arrive at a reliable number of towers on the basis of documented ownership changes. He eventually came up with an extraordinary number of 180 towers, an enormous amount considering the size and resources of medieval Bologna. (Read more.)

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When Europeans Were Slaves

An old article, but worth reading. Lately, I have been researching about the Viking slave trade, which involved kidnapping blond Saxon girls and selling them in Southern Europe and sometimes as far as Asia. But that was centuries before the time referred to in the article. From OSU:

A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

In a new book, Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.

Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Davis’s new estimates appear in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan). (Read more.)

More HERE.

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Blocking Security Clearances

 From The Last Refuge:

It should not come as a surprise to see the same methods deployed against President Trump in 2024 that were used by the FBI in 2016.  The difference is now that President Trump understands the full power of his office in the security clearance process and that he doesn’t need the FBI.

In 2016 the FBI used their power to conduct security clearances as a tool to stall and block President Trump appointments.  Historically this is one of the ways a very corrupt and political FBI interfere in any system that might be against the interests of the Intelligence Community that controls them. However, in 2024 President-Elect Trump and his transition team have already taken a different approach. (Read more.)

 

Some thoughts from It Can Always Get Worse:

The Islamic State (IS) rendered its verdict on Donald Trump’s re-election in the main editorial of the 469th edition of its weekly newsletter, Al-Naba, published on 14 November. The editorial is entitled, “The Unbelievers Will Not Be Successful”, drawn from Qur’an 23:117.

Al-Naba begins: “Politicians have overflowed with commentary about the expected changes after the taghut Trump takes power, [speaking] in a tone that suggests the world is subject to his absolute control and whim. They talk about him with a crazy, obsessive tendency, as if he was the orchestrating master of the Affairs of Creation! This is not an exaggeration, merely an unvarnished description of reality.” (Read more.)

FEMA in Georgia. From The Daily Wire:

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer revealed Tuesday that a whistleblower claimed a FEMA supervisor in Georgia directed a family to remove Trump campaign signage from their home, saying it was not “looked kindly” on by the agency. 

Comer made the statements during a hearing where lawmakers grilled FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell about an agency employee who told relief workers in Florida to “avoid homes advertising Trump.” Criswell has maintained that the guidance was an isolated incident and not the result of agency policy to skip over “politically hostile” homes.

But testimony from Comer and other lawmakers testimony casts doubt on Criswell’s comments. 

“My staff made contact with a new whistleblower who provided a credible account that a FEMA contractor visited the home of an elderly disabled veteran’s family around October 10 following Hurricane Helene,” Comer said after the committee came back from recess. “While there he recommended that they remove Trump campaign materials and signs from both their house and yard. He warned the family that his FEMA supervisor does not take kindly to Trump supporters and that they are seen as domestic terrorists.”  (Read more.)

 

From The Rand Paul Review:

Biden and the left walked right into Trump’s trap.  The former president baited the Biden-Harris team into an emotional reaction highlighted by the trash reference. 

“They treat you like garbage. They treat our whole country like garbage.  How do you like my garbage truck? Trump asked reporters. This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.” – President-elect Donald Trump

Trump made the comments during a publicity stunt in Green Bay just ahead of election night.  The best part was that The Don went to the extent of wearing a bright orange garbage collector safety vest. 

Trump even had his team pick him up from the local airport using a garbage truck.  He then rode that truck all the way to the Green Bay rally. (Read more.)

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The Strange Legend of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary

 From LBV:

The French were not the only encyclopedists; nor were they the first. In fact, they were inspired by the French translation of the Cyclopaedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, a work published twenty-three years earlier by the Englishman Ephraim Chambers, a globe maker turned author/editor who had, in turn, translated French scientific texts. In the Cyclopaedia, he included an entry under the same heading as Diderot, Agnus scythicus, which referred to a zoophyte (an animal with plant characteristics) with the appearance of a lamb living in Tartary. Other names given were Agnus vegetabilis and Agnus tartaricus, as well as endonyms like Borometz, Borametz, and Boranetz. (Read more.)

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The Versailles Boudoir

Marie-Antoinette could never escape the sexual rumor mill. And her friend Princesse de Lamballe was not guillotined but torn to pieces by a mob. According to The Smart Set:

From early in her rule, the Austrian-born queen inspired in her French subjects the most virulent misogyny. The market was flooded with whole libraries of violent pornography that depicted her as a wasteful and treacherous nymphomaniac who conducted orgies at Versailles, fornicated with cardinals and generals, and spied on France for the Austrians while satisfying her lusts. The most inventive, mock-serious work, Historical Essay on the Life of Marie-Antoinette hit the underground market in 1781 and was updated almost every year until her death, with vivid illustrations of the queen lifting her skirts for the entire male court. It was soon supplemented by Anandria, which depicted her in a lesbian love triangle with her ladies-in-waiting — the French having a particular obsession with the “German vice” — and sexually molesting her young son, the eight-year-old Dauphin.

This hallucinogenic strain of pornography might sound too extreme to have been taken seriously, but it resurfaced after the Revolution with concrete force as Marie-Antoinette was shuffled into ever more humiliating prisons. Her every public appearance was met with streams of abuse about her carnal desires; even a farewell to her most loyal friend, the Princess de Lamballe, who would soon end up on the guillotine, was reported in the press as a depraved lesbian embrace. The low point came at her trial in 1793, when the deposed queen — by now frail, pallid, and gray-haired — was accused before the packed court of committing incest with her son, the Dauphin....(Read more.)

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Boiling the Frog Slowly

 From Tierney's Real News:

The good news is that people are awake now and realize this is all a scam - even many who declared there was no fraud in 2020!

In 2020, I was warning people daily of the post-election steal - but few were listening. It was like yelling into an empty room. Today, Democrats are openly stealing races - because we didn’t stop them last time - and have even admitted that they are counting ILLEGAL ballots in many races. They feel emboldened and don’t care that what they are doing in illegal. They figure they will get away with it again.

Below is a snapshot of the fraud - in real time - day by day. There’s NO reason for these states to take weeks to count ballots - unless they are making them in the back room!

On election night, Trump was ahead by 7 MILLION in the popular vote (52%) and the numbers pointed out glaringly that there was NO way that Biden could have ever gotten 81 MILLION votes in 2020 unless they manufactured them out of thin air. (Read more.)

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Medieval Anglo-French Wars (1076-1453)

 From The Collector:

One of the more famous conflicts between France and England, the Hundred Years’ War, was a period of sporadic fighting between the two kingdoms that lasted for 116 years. The fighting started as a result of the death of the king of France, Charles IV, in 1328 at the age of 33. He left no direct heirs, and his closest relative was Edward III, the king of England. French nobles, however, refused to acknowledge any rights Edward had on the French throne, and crowned Philippe, Count of Valois, as the new king of France. Thus ended the Capetian dynasty, and began the reign of the Valois monarchs.

After the French demanded the return of Gascony, Edward III responded with military force. The English saw major successes in the first phases of the war, winning significant victories at Crécy in 1346 and Poitiers ten years later. English victories and the capture of the French king, Jean II, led to the Treaties of Brétigny and Calais, where vast portions of French land were ceded to England.

Jean, however, died in captivity, and his son, Charles, refused to abide by the treaties. He reignited the conflict and put France on the offensive. French pressure on the English petered out after the death of Charles V in 1380. Civil unrest in both kingdoms led to a pause in the conflict, but the unrest in England was quelled earlier than in France, and Henry V of England decided to take advantage of the situation by launching an invasion. (Read more.)

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The Sea Monsters of Ancient Greek Mythology

 
From The Greek Reporter:

These two sea monsters are almost always referred to in Ancient Greek mythology as a pair. This is because they were said to be two monsters on either side of a narrow strait, making them far more dangerous to ships than they ever would have been individually. Scylla was a multi-headed, serpentine monster that reached out to grab sailors from their boats. Charybdis was essentially an enormous, living whirlpool that would devour entire ships whenever it got the chance.

The most famous Greek myth featuring these two sea monsters is the Odyssey. This is the story of Odysseus attempting to sail back to Greece after the Trojan War. In this story, the goddess Circe advises Odysseus to sail closer to Scylla than to Charybdis. She points out that it would make more sense to lose six men than the entire ship. (Read more.)

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Trump Trumps Trump

From The Federalist:

Instead of rooting out the corruption at the department, most of permanent D.C. did absolutely nothing in response. Yet somehow the chattering class was shocked when Trump nominated loyal foot soldier Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fl., to be attorney general in Trump’s second term and to fix DOJ.

Gaetz had proven to be one of the most effective advocates against corruption at DOJ and was unwilling to back down in the face of overwhelming public pressure. However, Gaetz does not fit the education or experience profile of many previous attorneys general and has limited experience practicing law.

Many Americans are sick and tired of elected officials and media pundits doing nothing as DOJ attempted to destroy the country with its abuse of the rule of law. Among the many powerful figures in Washington, D.C. opposed to the Gaetz nomination are some who are attempting to thwart it by releasing a report from the House Ethics Committee that will attempt to tie Gaetz to salacious allegations involving child sex trafficking.

The report comes years after DOJ dropped its investigation into the same claims on the grounds that the two central witnesses had serious credibility issues. Yet these are the same two central witnesses the House Ethics Committee has relied on for its critical report of Gaetz—the same report it is leaking to compliant reporters as part of a coordinated effort to thwart his nomination as President-elect Donald Trump’s next attorney general. (Read more.)

 

DOGE. From The Daily Wire:

President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an effort to trim the fat under which the federal government labors — namely, a sprawling bureaucracy and runaway government spending.

Musk spawned the idea for the department and offered to head it up during an X space with Trump back in August. On Tuesday, Trump made DOGE official, saying in a statement that it will “dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies” and give government an “entrepreneurial approach.”

“It will become, potentially, ‘The Manhattan Project’ of our time,” Trump said.

The new department has already sparked endless memes — the DOGE acronym is a nod to the cryptocurrency Dogecoin. Musk is a fan, and briefly changed X’s logo to the coin’s dog meme last year. Another meme making the rounds shows Musk and Ramaswamy as the downsizing consultants from the movie “Office Space,” who famously ask an employee, “What would you say you do here?” (Read more.)

 

Meanwhile, in Ukraine:

Several mainstream news outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post and Reuters, reported Sunday that Joe Biden's administration has lifted restrictions that had blocked Ukraine from using U.S.-provided long-range missiles to strike deep into Russian territory.

The report originated in typical fashion, leaked to the New York Times by three unnamed deep-state sources.

This development marks “a significant change to U.S. policy in the Ukraine-Russia conflict,” Reuters reports, when in fact the U.S. policy was always to escalate the war, with this latest move no doubt planned months ago to be lowered like a hammer on Russia right before Trump takes office.

It’s no surprise. We knew it was coming. We predicted many times that the U.S. government would give the greenlight to such attacks, because we know that the U.S. deep state wants the war to escalate further before Donald Trump takes over the White House. Their hope is that the stampede toward World War III will become so intense by January 20th that Trump will be unable to stop it.

Ukraine plans to conduct its first long-range attacks in the coming days, the sources said, without revealing details due to operational security concerns.

The move by the United States, which comes just over two months before President-elect Donald Trump takes office on January 20, comes after months of requests by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to allow Ukraine's military to use U.S. weapons to hit Russian military targets far from its border. (Read more.)

More on Ukraine, HERE.

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Secret Mayan City with Full of Pyramids and Plazas

 From Arkeonews:

Tulane University researchers used laser-guided imaging to uncover vast unexplored Maya settlements in Campeche, Mexico, revealing more than 6,500 pre-Hispanic structures, including a previously unknown large city with stone pyramids.

The ability to examine large regions from the comfort of a laboratory thanks to Light Detection and Ranging (Lidar) technology has revolutionized the way archaic researchers study ancient civilizations in recent years.

The research project, led by doctoral student Luke Auld-Thomas alongside his advisor, Professor Marcello A. Canuto, both affiliated with Tulane’s Middle American Research Institute (MARI), used Lidar technology to study an area of 130 square kilometers in Campeche.

As part of a “non-archaeological” survey, the 50-square-mile area was mapped in 2013 using lidar, a remote-sensing technology, according to a study published today in the journal Antiquity. Examining this “found” dataset, the researchers discovered the ancient city concealed in plain sight in a region teeming with Maya settlements. They found evidence of over 6,500 structures in all.

The research focuses on a part of Campeche that had previously been overlooked in traditional archaeological research. “The government never knew about it; the scientific community never knew about it,” says lead author Luke Auld-Thomas, an archaeologist at Tulane University, in a statement. (Read more.)

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Queen Victoria, the Stuarts and Scotland

Victoria and Albert as Catherine of Braganza and Charles II by Winterhalter

Gown worn by Victoria at her Stuart Ball

Tartan dress of Queen Victoria

Royal Family in Highlands

Scotch air, Scotch people, Scotch hills, Scotch rivers, Scotch woods, are all far preferable to those of any other nation in or out of this world.~Queen Victoria, ca. 1849. 

 In the mid-18th century, in an uprising known as "The 45" Prince Charles Edward Stuart tried to reconquer the thrones of England and Scotland for his father James III, known as the "Old Pretender." The thrones had been usurped by the German and Protestant House of Hanover in spite of the fact that the legal Catholic sovereign was alive and well. The Scots in particular did not take well to their rightful sovereign being disinherited because of the English preference for German Protestants. The uprising failed miserably, bringing more hardship and tragedy to the Scottish people for the remainder of the century. Meanwhile many songs, tales and legends of that time imprinted themselves upon the land and the people. Many of those tales and legends found their way into the writings of Sir Walter Scott, one of the first historical novelists, whose Waverley novels of the early 19th century brought the lost Stuart rebellions and their heroes to life for a new generation. The prince Regent, the future George IV, rebelled against his Hanoverian patrimony after reading the Scott novels, and headed for Scotland.

From Peter Harrington:

The romanticisation of Scotland can be most definitively linked in literature with the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott. The first of the Waverley novels was published in 1814 and was set during the Jacobite uprising which took place almost a century earlier. The novels were so popular that Scott was propelled to fame, and was invited to dine with King George IV, (then Prince Regent). When, several years later, the Scottish ‘Radical War’ of 1820, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, caused King George to plan the first royal visit to Scotland in over two hundred years in an effort to quell unrest, it was Scott he called on to carefully stage manage the visit. By now a baronet with numerous valuable connections to Scottish nobility, Scott saw the opportunity both to avert an uprising and to promote highland culture. He reasoned that, because of George’s lineage, the king could legitimately claim as much Stuart heritage as Bonnie Prince Charlie and could thus present himself as a Jacobite prince, properly accoutred Royal Stuart tartan. Kilts at this time were no longer generally worn, having been banned by the Dress Act of 1746, which made the wearing of ‘Highland dress’ illegal. Though the act was repealed in 1782, kilts had only come back into fashion with the Scottish gentry, a number of whom set up ‘Highland Societies’.... For the king to appear so attired was not only an attempt to appeal to the heritage of the Scottish people but also to gloss over old wrongs.

George’s visit sparked an interest in Scottish dress, and, in its wake, the demand for kilts grew so high that Scottish weaving mills were unable to cope with the demand. It was in this period that (contrary to the generally assumed belief that individualised tartans are a much older tradition) many of the clan tartans were designated. (Read more.)

 George IV died and was succeeded by his brother William IV, who in turn left the throne to their niece Victoria in 1837. It was the Romantic Era, and Queen Victoria also loved the Waverley novels. In general she found the Stuarts far more romantic than her own Hanoverians and decided to fill her life with tokens of the Stuart homeland of Scotland. Her beloved husband Prince Albert shared her predilection, in spite of being German himself and in the 1840's they began spending as much time as possible in their northern kingdom.

From Quartermile Blog:

The first land to capture the Queen’s heart wasn’t Scotland, but Ireland. Early in her reign, Victoria spent her holidays in. Yet after the potato famine of 1845 irreparable damage was done to the relationship between the British government and the people of Ireland. Despite Victoria’s personal donation of £5,000 to the cause (nearly £600,000 in today’s money) and her visit to the country in 1849, the relationship never recovered....Scotland fared much better in Victoria’s eyes. In fact, Victoria made frequent visits north of the border during her reign despite the fact that Scotland had only been visited twice by reigning monarchs in the previous two centuries.

Victoria and Albert’s love for Scotland drove them to take out a long-term lease on the stunning Balmoral Castle in Deeside in 1848. Later, in 1852, the royal couple permanently purchased the property for £31,500 (£4million today) and had it significantly extended. From this point on, Victoria and Albert spent a section of each summer in Balmoral, thanks to the advances in British rail travel....Victoria’s ever growing affection for Scotland didn’t just stretch to the land itself, but to the culture and fashion too. Through their experience of Scotland, Victoria and Albert both became big fans of tartan, and helped to elevate the status and reputation of the pattern south of the border.

According to accounts from the time, Victoria and Albert enthusiastically redecorated Balmoral Castle with reams of “Balmoral tartan, in red and grey” furnishings. They even included “innumerable stags’ antlers” in their décor. For Victoria, the use of tartan was an outward sign of being connected to her favourite part of the world. (Read more.)

Victoria showed that she not only loved Scotland but cherished the memory of the Stuarts, masquerading as Catherine of Braganza, consort of Charles II, at a ball. She had an Italian sculptor create a marble statue of Princess Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of Charles I who died in prison at age thirteen, reputedly with her head on her murdered father's Bible. She passed the interest on to her children, as can be seen from a water color of Mary Queen of Scots by the Princess Royal. The Stuarts must have fulfilled Victoria's vision of a monarchy in which the kings and queens did not only reign but ruled, had adventures, tragedies, romances and died for love.

Princess Elizabeth Stuart: "Go ... And see the tomb of Charles's child wet with Victoria's tears"

Carl Haag’s "Luncheon at Cairn Lochan" depicts the royal family picnicking in Scotland.

Balmoral today with flock wallpaper ordered by Queen Victoria

Painting of Mary Queen of Scots by Queen Victoria's daughter the Princess Royal

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Cleaning House

 

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The Brothers Grimm: Dark for a Reason

 From The New Yorker:

It was also at Marburg, and through Savigny, that the Grimms fell in with Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, two wellborn writers who had begun to amass German folk songs, aiming to capture the Volksseele—the soul of the people—that predated the European Enlightenment and French neoclassicism. Arnim and Brentano were founding members of what became known as Heidelberg Romanticism. If early German Romanticism, which flowered in Jena, in the seventeen-nineties, prized the “individual, subjective worldview,” Schmiesing writes, “the Heidelberg Romantics celebrated folk and heroic literature because they saw in it the collective experience of a people.”

[...]

 The first volume of the Grimms’ “Children’s and Household Tales” was published in December of 1812. It contained eighty-six stories, including classics like “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Briar Rose,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” along with extensive footnotes. Critics weren’t sure what to make of a collection of “children’s tales” that came with scholarly addenda and randy animals. “Mrs. Fox,” where a fox with nine tails, which scan as furry phallic symbols, tests his wife’s faithfulness, was not the kind of bedtime story that parents had in mind. The same went for “Rapunzel,” in which the fairy (not the witch) realizes that her long-tressed prisoner has been receiving visits from the prince when, one day, Rapunzel asks, “Why are my clothes becoming too tight?” For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, weren’t always intended for children. According to the scholar Maria Tatar, these were folktales shared among adults after hours, while the children were asleep. She cites a French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the big bad wolf has designs on the little girl that are not gastronomical. In that version, she does what amounts to a striptease, peeling off her clothes as the disguised wolf watches from the bed, giving fresher context to “What big hands you have!”

Then, there was the matter of the Grimms’ language—sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered. In the preface, the brothers boasted of the collection’s fidelity to their sources: “No circumstance has been poeticized, beautified, or altered.” Well, that much was clear, complained the Grimms’ old friend Clemens Brentano, who thought they went too far. “If you want to display children’s clothes,” Brentano wrote, “you can do that with fidelity without bringing out an outfit that has all the buttons torn off, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants.” But the Grimms wanted to preserve the culture of the common folk, not to make the folk sound cultured. (Read more.)

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A Perfect English Country Retreat

From Country Life:

All this, plus a dovecot for 1,000 birds at Jaggards, in the heart of Wiltshire. Down in Wiltshire, Oliver Custance Baker of Strutt & Parker’s country department is overseeing the sale of the Grade II*-listed Jaggards at Neston, two miles from Corsham and 9½ miles from Bath. He quotes a guide price of ‘excess £2.95m’ for this graceful, elegant family home.

What today is essentially a Jacobean manor house is in fact a 700-year-old property that was rebuilt in 1657 for R. Kington, but which still incorporates parts of the original medieval house. And as you can see, it also blends elements of Georgian and Victorian design from the changes made over the centuries, all coming together in a home described by the agent as ‘the perfect English country retreat from the modern world ‘. According to its Historic England listing, it was part of a holding first referred to in 1340, which was held by the Kington family from about 1560–1766, before passing to J. Shore, the Leir family and, in 1866, to J. B. Fuller of Neston Park. (Read more.)

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Make America Healthy Again

 #RFKjr and #CalleyMeans.

 

 

From The Rand Paul Review:

Time and time again, the medical establishment in this country has proven itself to be untrustworthy. Whether they’re funding gain-of-function research (and then lying about it) or sending out mini-tyrants like Anthony Fauci to trample on our rights, the signs are clear.

When we the people speak out about the dangers this poses, we’re gaslight. Both the establishment and their foot soldiers accuse Americans of being “conspiracy theorists” for daring to question the status quo.

We saw this rear its ugly head during COVID. In fact, everyday folks were accused of being menaces to public health, all for daring to have reservations about a rushed vaccine. 

Sadly, the corruption of the medical establishment runs far deeper than most Americans realize. Right now, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is under fire for accepting payouts from foreign entities. (Read more.)

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The Fascinating Story of the Real-Life Alexis Zorbas

 From The Greek Reporter:

Zorba the Greek, the story of Alexis Zorbas, is one of the most memorable films in the history of the genre, and the Nikos Kazantzakis book on which it is based is one of the best works of modern Greek literature. Yet, it is not widely known that Zorbas was a real person and not a fictional character. Nor is it known that the real person had never set foot on Crete and was not actually named Alexis. When Nikos Kazantzakis met Giorgos Zorbas on Mount Athos in 1915, the man impressed the writer so much that he befriended him, and he was later inspired to write a novel based on his carefree personality and lust for life. (Read more.)

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The Church Under the Tang Dynasty: A Forgotten Outpost of Christianity

 From The Collector:

During the reigns of his successors, Taizong (626-649) and Gaozong (649-683), China’s territory was greatly expanded. Through a series of successful wars against Turkic tribes to the east, they established control over the Silk Road.

Trade with other Asian countries expanded through both land and maritime routes. Thanks to this expansion of trade, during the early Tang Period, China entered an era of economic, social, and cultural prosperity. A great number of foreigners came to China, mostly from neighboring countries but also from other parts of Asia. They settled in big trading cities and towns and were mostly engaged in business, but they also influenced China’s cultural life during this period.

Various forms of cultural activity bloomed during this period of peace and prosperity, such as art, poetry, and fashion. The capital city of Cnang’an became the residence of many artists, such as Zhang Xuan (c. 713-755). Tang China also served as a model for other Asian countries and their dynasties, such as Korea and Japan. They looked to Tang Dynasty rulers in order to use their experiences to strengthen their states. (Read more.)

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Seven Lessons the 2024 Election Should Teach America’s Leaders

 From Return to Order:

     1. America Wants New Leadership

A restoration cannot be accomplished solely by removing bad laws and failing programs. It will not happen by promising free benefits, tax cuts or other assistance. The election showed that people want new leadership that can change the direction of the country and lead the way back to common sense and stability.

This attitude was reflected in the debate. People did not want platitudes but leadership.

     2. We Want (and Need) God!

The left hates it, but there is a “Ten Commandments” American who is an essential part of the public and has a special attachment to all things pertaining to God and His Law. One candidate welcomed references to God, prayer and Scripture throughout the presidential election. The other candidate did not embrace this message. The results show that religion still resonates with the American public. It is time to bring Our Lord back into the center of American Life.

     3. Politics Cannot Replace Families

The traditional family is the basis of all order in society. God created the family to meet each person’s most basic needs. Children learn basic lessons at their mothers’ knees. Fathers teach their offspring to work and support themselves. Parents teach children to love God and His Law.

The election was all about families. It was a dispute between two visions of the family. One vision saw “family” as whatever individuals decide they want it to be, thus leading to abortion, broken unions, classroom failures and ineffective social welfare programs. The other vision adhered more to the traditional union of a man and a woman directed toward the upbringing of offspring. It is time to abandon the fallacy that the government knows best for the family.

     4. The Permissive Society Destroys Everything

For too many years, leftists in government, academia and the media have misrepresented morality as repression and tyranny. The ruins of that premise lie everywhere in a society that is falling apart. This revolution inside society is pushing everything—identity, sexuality and behavior—to ever greater violence and radicalism. This election questioned these premises and promises of the permissive society. (Read more.)

 

From Daniel McCarthy at Chronicles:

Make no mistake: Any Republican other than Trump would also have been branded a “fascist” and woman-hater, but unlike a typical politician, Trump never tried to soften his image to please his enemies. Biden could only compete with Trump because he reminded voters of the days before Democrats went woke.

They wanted to believe they could still vote for the party of Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy, a patriotic party with a focus on blue-collar workers, not just the financial interests and identity-politics obsessions of the college-educated elite. Biden challenged Trump for Trump’s own voters, even if in truth Biden wasn’t so different from the politically correct yuppies who’ve run the Democratic Party since the 1990s.

Biden was too infirm to fight a second election, yet Democrats had no one else—and no one on their horizon today looks ready to compete with the populist Trump-Vance version of the GOP.

This leadership crisis began with Barack Obama.

What’s true for kings is true for presidents as well: Success depends on producing an heir. But Obama left his party without anyone who could do what he did—maybe because what he did was less impressive than his admirers assumed. After all, Obama chose an already senior Biden as his vice president because Obama was inexperienced and unsure he could count on older Democrats’ support. Biden was a crutch in 2008—and still was in 2020.

Once Democrats didn’t have anyone with Obama’s charisma to deflect concerns about the drift of the party, what did they have? They had Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, who thought that being female—and, in Harris’ case, black and Indian—would earn them points regardless of their bankrupt policies.

By contrast, Trump was an outsider, and that’s what voters longed for: someone to break with the weak border policies, foreign-policy incompetence and “Americans Last” globalist economics of Washington’s leadership class. Clinton and Harris—and other Democratic hopefuls from Pete Buttigieg to Gavin Newsom—only offered more of the same, plus identity politics and transgenderism for children. (Read more.)

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2200-Year-Old Mosaics Discovered

 From AMZ Newspaper:

Three new mosaics have been uncovered in the ancient Greek city of Zeugma, which is actually located in today’s Turkey. The incredibly well preserved mosaics date back to the 2nd century BC, but they’re still as beautiful as the first day. There are actually two ancient cities called Zeugma – one in Dacia (probably today’s Romania), and one in modern Gaziantep Province, Turkey. The one in Turkey was considered one of the biggest trading hubs in the Eastern Roman Empire and thrived until the third century – when it was completely destroyed by a Sassanid king and then subsequently hit by an earthquake. The city never recovered. (Read more.)

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Ode to Autumn

The Cedar Lot, Old Lyme, 1904, Childe Hassam

 From East of the Sun, West of the Moon.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

      For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

~ excerpt from "Ode to Autumn" by John Keats

 

 

 

 

More pictures and poems, HERE.

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An Energy Renaissance

 

 

 

From The Daily Wire:

President-elect Donald Trump nominated Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), one of his most ardent supporters, to serve as the next Attorney General of the United States.

“Matt is a deeply gifted and tenacious attorney, trained at the William & Mary College of Law, who has distinguished himself in Congress through his focus on achieving desperately needed reform at the Department of Justice,” Trump posted on social media.

Trump said that ending the weaponization of the justice system was one of his top priorities and that Gaetz would focus on that issue along with prosecuting drug cartels.

“On the House Judiciary Committee, which performs oversight of DOJ, Matt played a key role in defeating the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, and exposing alarming and systemic Government Corruption and Weaponization,” Trump said.  (Read more.)

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Ancient Technology

 From Ancient Origins:

The problem stems from the modern understanding of the word “advanced”. Today, we are almost obsessed with being “advanced”, even when it hampers us in certain ways. We connect this advancement with technologies and modern innovation but fail to understand that there were numerous ways to advance, even in prehistory. Early humans certainly advanced as well, for their time, in social organization, in adapting to their environment, creating better tools and hunting tactics, and honing their cognitive abilities. And as we take all this into account, we begin to understand that they were much more intellectually and culturally developed than is usually thought.

 One of the foremost aspects in which ancient humans were more advanced than first thought is exploration and navigation. We must remember that with the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans, people began spreading all across the globe, discovering new hunting grounds and new bountiful lands where man never before set foot. But what about the seas? Ancient humans didn’t shy away from these, as there is ample evidence of prehistoric sea travel. Yes - our ancestors were skilled mariners. Scholars commonly agree that, for example, Australia had been colonized some 65,000 years ago. This feat required arduous sea voyages and the crossing of hundreds of kilometers of open sea. This implies that some early societies had a rudimentary understanding of oceanic navigation and sailing as well. Comparable is evidence from Micronesia and the Solomon Islands, which indicates early long-distance voyages across the Pacific, when new islands were discovered and settled. (Read more.)

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Dionysus’ Invasion of India

 From The Greek Reporter:

According to ancient myths, Dionysus, the ancient Greek god of wine, invaded India long before Alexander the Great was born. Dionysus is an Ancient Greek god and also part of the Roman pantheon. He was known as Bacchus to the Romans and was connected with the Italian god of fertility and wine, Liber Pater. Interestingly, he is also associated with India and is often mentioned in references of classical antiquity. According to myth, Dionysus, the wine god, arrived in India and conquered the lands, founded cities, and established laws. (Read more.)

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A Pilgrimage to Ireland

 From my newsletter:

Last month my daughter and I accompanied our parish priest and several parishioners on a pilgrimage to Ireland. We traveled with Mark Forrest, the Irish tenor, a grand gentleman. We saw the West and the South of Ireland, stopping at holy places along the way. I have written a great deal about my Irish ancestors, the Kerry-O'Connors, including a novel about them entitled The Paradise Tree. However, I had never set foot in Ireland. I was immediately struck with the feeling of having come home. It was a strange feeling, since I had never been there and everything was new, new but familiar at the same time. Thousands of years of Irish ancestral memory must be deep in my DNA. (Read more.)

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What Happened to Those 15,000,000 Biden Voters?!

 

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Hidden in a Saudi Arabian Oasis

 From Live Science:

A small 4,400-year-old town in the Khaybar Oasis of Saudi Arabia hints that Bronze Age people in this region were slow to urbanize, unlike their contemporaries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, a new study finds.

Archaeologists discovered the site near the city of Al-'Ula in the Hejaz region of western Saudi Arabia and called it "al-Natah." The settlement covered about 3.7 acres (1.5 hectares), "including a central district and nearby residential district surrounded by protective ramparts," the researchers said in a statement. But the town, which was occupied starting around 2400 B.C., was small, with a population of only around 500 people, the team noted in a study, published Wednesday (Oct. 30) in the journal PLOS One.

The residential area had a large amount of pottery and grinding stones, as well as the remains of at least 50 dwellings that may have been made of earthen materials. The central area had two buildings that may have been used as administrative areas, the team wrote in the paper. In the western part of the central area, a necropolis was found. It has large and high circular tombs that archaeologists call "stepped tower tombs." (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette's Lost Couch

 The fact that they even mention the cake myth in the following article is regrettable. And I know of no portrait that shows the Queen reclining on a couch. They must be referring to the Coppola film. From The San Francisco Standard:

“This piece of furniture has a very complicated history,” Williams said. Commissioned for Versailles in 1779, it was included in an inventory of furniture taken from the palace shared by Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, a few months before their heads were chopped off in a public square in Paris by French revolutionaries.

“For the lavish furniture of the last tyrants of France,” read the report, “a general inventory will be made for the sale of the current items of furniture estimated to be worth less than a thousand livres.” 

More than 17,000 objects were sold in lots to raise money for the state. Gilded clocks, tapestries, jewels, art, and Europe’s finest furniture were dispersed across the world.

Some of these objects were taken by Napoleon; others found their way to the homes of English and German aristocrats and American ambassadors. But Antoinette’s couch found its way, eventually, to San Francisco. 

Likely moving from one rich estate to the next, the couch was first it was sawed in half and reupholstered several times before making its way to the historical museum at Lands End. 

In what Williams called one of the museum’s most ambitious efforts and a longtime passion project for Martin Chapman, the now-retired curator in charge of European decorative arts and sculpture, the museum began the delicate work of restoring the couch in 2006. More than a dozen people were involved, from historians who traced the couch’s provenance to conservationists and chemists like Williams who worked to restore its trim through X-ray radiography. Replicas of the peonies, roses, pansies, daffodils, and cornflowers that line the white cushions were embroidered by a centennial French company specializing in haute couture. 

Now, after 18 years of research and restoration, the piece is considered as close to its original form as possible — a couch truly fit for a queen.

Much of its history is unknown, including when it left France or whether Antoinette ever actually laid down on it. The museum purchased it at an auction in 1957, when an FAMSF employee recognized its significance and purchased it for the collection. (Read more.)

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