The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi

 

I just finished reading The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi by award-winning journalist Mark Judge. We all remember the terrible days of the Kavanaugh hearings in 2018, when the hope we all felt at the appointment of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court by President Trump was dashed by the allegations of sexual assault. The woman making the accusations was Christine Blasey Ford who had gone to a girls’ school near Georgetown Prep where Kavanaugh was a student. The allegations were vague as to time and place, except that Ford claimed that as a fifteen year-old she had been assaulted at a party by the seventeen-year-old Kavanaugh with his pal Mark Judge standing by. Ford’s allegation was followed by even more serious accusations from another woman who asserted that as teenagers Kavanaugh and Judge had taken part in gang rapes of drugged girls. The accusations were not supported by evidence or credible witnesses, and yet the anti-Trump media seized on them as if they were graven on the stone tablets of Sinai.

While such lurid accusations were emerging in 2018, I remember being horrified at what were clearly lies. I thought back to my own youth in Frederick County, Maryland, the county next door to Montgomery County, where Brett Kavanaugh and Mark Judge lived and went to school. At roughly the same time, I was a student at St. John’s at Prospect Hall in Frederick, a co-ed Catholic school in a shabby mansion with aspirations to be a prep school. There was a similar culture of partying and drinking but a line was drawn when it came to taking advantage of people who were inebriated. We had many students from Montgomery County come to our school, mostly from families who could not afford the prep schools of Montgomery County, or who had been expelled from them for behavior problems. Our basketball team played Georgetown Prep. So we heard stories from other schools, and news got around. If there had been anything like a gang rape, everyone would have heard about it. But there was never a peep.

Mark Judge has written of his high school days in his memoirs God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Wasted and a Tremor of Bliss, all of which portray the era with wit and humor while exposing the disasters wrought by the sexual revolution upon Catholic education. Unfortunately, the Democratic cabal, determined to keep Kavanaugh off the Supreme Court, combed through Judge’s books with a magnifying glass, trying to find evidence against Kavanaugh. They even sought for long lost copies of the school underground school newspaper edited by Judge. Sadly, there is much evil that evil people can try to read into things when they are looking for dirt. Judge was pressured to accuse his friend Kavanaugh but maintained that not only did he have no memory of the alleged incidents at all, but the Brett Kavanaugh he knew would never have behaved in such a way. Judge describes his personal ordeal in The Devil’s Triangle as Democrat operatives used tactics which we once only associated with Communist countries, particularly East German stasi. The same tactics were used against Trump supporters and against Trump himself. Mercifully, Kavanaugh now sits on the Supreme Court and Trump is in the White House, as the attempts to destroy them failed. I would encourage everyone to read The Devil’s Triangle to be aware of things that are not supposed to happen in America but have happened and will continue to happen as long as we vote Democrats and RINOS into public office.

The Devil's Triangle is available at Amazon.

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Schumer’s Shutdown Gamble:Van Hollen & Alsobrooks Follow Him Off the Cliff

 From Direct Line News:

Politics is about choices. And right now, Democrats are making the worst possible one. They’re marching straight into a shutdown showdown that doesn’t merely risk short-term political pain but threatens to inflict permanent structural losses on the government programs they claim to cherish. At the front of this parade is Chuck Schumer—dragged leftward by activists who threaten him with a primary. And right behind him, dutifully following in lockstep, are Maryland’s own Chris Van Hollen and Angela Alsobrooks.

The New Weapon: Shutdown as a Reset

This is not your typical government shutdown. The White House has revealed a far sharper tool. A memo from Russell Vought, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, instructs federal agencies that if the government closes, they are not to merely furlough workers but to prepare permanent layoffs for employees in discretionary programs that don’t align with administration priorities (PBS NewsHour).

Shutdowns used to mean inconvenience—workers sent home, then brought back when funding resumed. Not this time. This strategy transforms the shutdown into a restructuring event, providing an opportunity to permanently reduce the federal workforce. The administration already expects roughly 300,000 fewer federal employees this year (Reuters). A shutdown accelerates that mission. (Read more.)

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Artifacts from the Colony of Avalon

 Founded by the Calverts. From Smithsonian:

The coastal Colony of Avalon in Ferryland was chartered by the British statesman George Calvert in 1623. Today, it’s considered one of the best-preserved early English colonial sites in North America. Archaeologists have been conducting major excavations at the site since the 1990s, and they typically find about 3,000 artifacts every week during dig seasons.

This summer, Calum Brydon, an archaeologist at Memorial University, was investigating the ruins of an Avalon storage room when he saw the wampum. 

“When I first found it, I wasn’t entirely sure what it was,” Brydon tells CBC News’ Henrike Wilhelm. “There was part of me that realized it’s a shell bead, and it just didn’t quite click.”

“Wampum” is an English word derived from an eastern Algonquian term that means “strings of white.” Indigenous groups of northeastern North America carved the beads from shells of quahog (clams) and whelk (sea snails). They incorporated the beads into belts and necklaces, which were sometimes used to mark important events. Later, they may have used the beads to trade with European settlers.

“The wampum [were] likely brought to Ferryland through trade or exchange with Dutch or New England merchants who had previously traded or exchanged wampum with Indigenous peoples,” Memorial University archaeologist Barry Gaulton, the director of the excavations, tells Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. (Read more.)

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Michaelmas

It is Michaelmas Day. According to Lives of the Saints:

St. Michael, who ranks among the seven archangels, is also one of the three angels mentioned by name in the Scriptures, the others being St. Raphael and St. Gabriel. St. Michael is spoken of twice in the Old Testament, and twice in the New. The first reference occurs in the Book of Daniel (chapter x), where Michael comes to comfort Daniel after he has had a vision, and promises to be his helper in all things. In Daniel xii, Michael is called "the great prince who standeth for the children of Thy people." In these references Michael is represented as Israel's great support during the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity. Daniel, wise and holy leader that he was, wanted his people to understand that God had not forgotten them, and that, even though enslaved, they had a royal champion. In the New Testament (Jude ix), we are told that Michael disputed with the devil over the body of Moses; this episode is not mentioned elsewhere in the Bible.

In the Apocalypse (chapter xii) we find the most dramatic reference to St. Michael. Here John recounts the great battle in Heaven, when the wicked angels under Lucifer revolt against God, and how Michael, leading the faithful angels, defeats the hosts of evil and drives them out. In this role he has been painted by many artists, and the poet Milton, in book vi of , recounts the famous struggle. Because of this victory, St. Michael is revered in Catholic tradition and liturgy as the protector of the Church, as once he was regarded as the protector of the Israelites. In the Eastern Church, as well as among many theologians in the West, St Michael is placed over all the angels, as prince of the Seraphim. He is the special patron of sick people, mariners, and grocers; in Asia Minor many curative springs were dedicated to him. His cult has also been popular in Egypt, Rome, France, and Germany. His emblems are a banner, a sword, a dragon, and scales. The name Michael is a variation of Micah, meaning in Hebrew, "Who is like God?"

The Archangel St. Michael is one of the patrons of France, partly because of his various manifestations in that country, most notably to St. Jeanne d'Arc. In the middle ages the Order of St. Michael was the highest among the orders of chivalry. Share

Quebec Allows 3 Men to Adopt 3-Year-Old Girl

 From Newsmax:

Quebec has approved its first adoption by a polyamorous trio — a "throuple" — granting three men legal recognition as parents of a 3-year-old girl, according to Visegrad24. The groundbreaking case follows a Superior Court ruling earlier this year that affirmed children can have more than two legal parents. Two men are officially registered as the girl's parents, while the third is seeking full recognition under Quebec's revised Civil Code, which now accommodates multiparent families.

The adoption, finalized after a full home study and court review, marks a significant shift in Canadian family law, expanding parental rights beyond traditional norms. The decision follows a landmark April 25 ruling by the Quebec Superior Court that declared the province's rules tying filiation to a maximum of two parents unconstitutional and gave Quebec 12 months to amend its Civil Code so that children in "multiparent" families enjoy the same rights and protections as those in two-parent households. The ruling was brought by La Coalition des familles LGBT+ and several families that had been unable to list more than two parents on birth records. (Read more.)

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The Greatest Lie of the Modern World

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

I was deep in the feminist movement where sentiments like these were very prevalent. I do think I would have ever argued that men and woman were the same, but I did believe that women could do all that men could, to the same degree. So I guess in a logical sense I did believe it, I just like many other feminists, loved to deny the logical conclusions of my own statements.

I truly believed women could be as strong as men, do the same jobs, accomplish the same things, and to the same degree. Truly a mass delusion.

But why have women been convinced that they need to be equal to men? It’s because feminism has made the male archetype the goal all women should strive for. Male qualities, accomplishments and behavior are what have been deemed as the standard. Despite feminists disliking so much of masculinity, they’ve made it their shrine, one to which all women must bow and strive for.

In their “goal” to make women equal to men, they’ve just erased womanhood.

And no matter how much propaganda we are fed, our bodies, our minds and our souls do not lie. We will never be the same, because we were not designed to be the same. (Read more.)

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The Mystery of the Oldest Throne in Europe

 

From The Greek Reporter:

The magnificent throne room in the 15th century BC palace of Knossos in Crete at the center of Minoan civilization is believed to be the oldest such room in Europe. The Minoan civilization flourished for approximately two thousand years. The magnificent Knossos complex had large palace buildings, extensive workshop installations, and a luxurious rock-cut cave and tholos tombs. As a major center of trade and the economy, Knossos maintained ties with the majority of cities in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The palace was a great labyrinthine complex of 20,000 meters (65,616 feet) in length, a ceremonial, religious, and political center that reflected great wealth, power, and highly advanced architecture. It was based around a central courtyard with more than a thousand interlinked, maze-like halls and chambers. (Read more.)

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The Battle For Chicago

From AND Magazine:

In war, the enemy gets a vote. They make plans too. Just because you have decided on a course of action and want a particular result does not mean your opponent is required to cooperate. Witness what is happening in Chicago right now. President Trump has declared Antifa a terrorist organization and promised to destroy the nationwide networks that feed it and help it organize. In and of itself, that means nothing. Until this “crackdown” starts to produce concrete results, Antifa remains alive and well and is fighting back. Its immediate target is Chicago, where Antifa forces have encircled the Broadview ICE detention facility.

“Today, over 200 rioters blocked access to one of the gates in front of the Broadview Processing Center, and another 30 have swarmed another gate and are attempting to forcibly and illegally trespass on federal property. Rioters arrived with boxes of fireworks, N95 masks, gas masks, goggles, knee and elbow protection, and large quantities of food and water. These lawless rioters began chanting “Arrest ICE, Shoot ICE,” and one of the rioters was apprehended with a gun, and it was confiscated by law enforcement.”

Department of Homeland Security Press Release

The federal government called on Illinois Governor Pritzker to condemn the riots and call for their end. Pritzker is unlikely to help. He says that ICE is transforming the United States into Nazi Germany. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson calls ICE “secret police” who “are terrorizing our communities.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi said late Friday she had ordered Justice Department agents to guard Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities and directed counterterrorism task forces to look into attacks against federal authorities. What exactly that means and what DOJ forces we are talking about remains unclear.

“At my direction, I am deploying DOJ agents to ICE facilities—and wherever ICE comes under siege—to safeguard federal agents, protect federal property, and immediately arrest all individuals engaged in any federal crime,” Bondi wrote on X. (Read more.)

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The European Roots of Africa's Giant Predatory Dinosaurs

 From Phys.org:

Tyrannosaurus is perhaps the best-known bipedal predatory dinosaur—but not the largest known representative of this group: Spinosaurus occurred in Africa in the early Late Cretaceous period (about 95 million years ago) and was even larger, measuring up to 18 meters in length.

In collaboration with Spanish colleagues, Rauhut has now found new evidence that the gigantic spinosaurs had their roots in Europe. New finds and the re-examination of previously collected remains of the little-known predatory dinosaur Camarillasaurus cirugedae from the Lower Cretaceous period (about 128 million years ago) in Spain show that this species was a close relative of the giant North African spinosaurs.

Camarillasaurus was found in the central Spanish province of Teruel. The fossil was originally classified as a ceratosaur—a group of predatory dinosaurs little known in Europe and whose occurrence in the Lower Cretaceous of Spain would represent a find "outside of space and time," as stated in the original publication. This interpretation was based on a few fragmentary remains described more than 10 years ago. (Read more.)

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The Case For Pretty Plates

 

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

Femininity, at its core, resists this. The feminine impulse decorates, softens, adorns. Women used to carry this instinct into their homes, lace curtains, embroidered linens, china cabinets filled with delicate dishes that spoke of continuity and care. These were not frivolities; they were signatures of a world where beauty was treated as essential to life, where the feminine qualities were expected in a home.

Now, we’re told to save space. To declutter. To strip away. To keep the walls bare, the counters empty, the cabinets minimal. But a sterile home makes sterile souls. When everything is cold, the family forgets warmth.

The table is where this can be reclaimed. To set with real plates, glasses, napkins, is to bring femininity back into the center of the home. It is a reminder that we are not just bodies to be fueled but souls to be nurtured. A plate can hold food, yes, but it also holds memory, beauty, and meaning. It’s where the family can truly sit and grow.

And this is not nostalgia for “fancier times.” It is a recognition that beauty is tied to transcendence. To eat on something beautiful is to be reminded, if only faintly, of the banquet that awaits us in eternity. This is why Christianity gave the table such reverence: because it knows that the way we eat says something about what we believe life is for. (Read more.)

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The Storm Begins

 From Coffee and Covid 2025:

The news is bursting, so let’s get to it. Your roundup today includes: Trump 2.0’s consolidation phase officially ended last night with the ‘shocking’ indictment of James Comey for lying to Congress, and the next exciting and dangerous “Storm” phase has begun; President Trump signs another domestic terror executive order and this one has sharper teeth—the consolidation phase is over and the Storm Phase has begun; two ivermectin stories from Florida; over-the-counter bill filed, terrifying liberals; DeSantis announces ivermectin-cancer initiatives, which scared them even more; and Secretary Kennedy opts out of United Nation’s stupid health plan.

 [...]

Arrests. The Storm has begun. Mark down the name of James Comey in your daily journal as the man who launched the whirlwind. Politico covered the story this morning below the simple, four-word headline, “Comey indictment stuns Washington.” Oh, what tangled webs we weave, when we practice to deceive. (Read more.)

From James Howard Kunstler:

Mr. Comey’s indictment is probably just the opening salvo in what will be a barrage of indictments coming down against government officials who used their powers-under-law to harass, disable, cancel, dis-bar, bankrupt, persecute and ruin thousands of their fellow citizens, including especially the 45^th president and the people who worked for him.

Jim Comey was the engine who pulled the choo-choo train of seditious fakery known as RussiaGate (Donald Trump colluding with Vladimir Putin) into America’s public life, which then expanded into the years-long ass-covering operations of the Mueller Investigation, then Impeachments One and Two, then the J-6 FBI-engineered “insurrection,” then Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional J-6 committee gong show, and then the four various fugazi prosecutions against Mr. Trump in 2024 designed to derail his re-run for office, bankrupt his family, and stuff him in prison for the rest of his life. (Read more.)

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An Interview with Angela Franks, Author of “Body and Identity”

 From Notre Dame Press:

Angela Franks is an assistant professor of theology at the Catholic University of America. The University of Notre Dame Press is thrilled to publish her new book, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self (August 2025), which was also recently selected as a winner of the Expanded Reason Awards. She recently answered some of our questions about her research and writing processes.

When did you first get the idea to write this book? 

The idea came gradually to me, over the last ten years, and the projected book went through many different inchoate forms. I knew I wanted to explore the meaning of the body. I settled on the importance of focusing on identity when it became clear to me that most of what we think are body-problems—especially those relating to how we appear to others—are actually identity-problems.

Certainly these are unprecedented times in the United States, Europe, and around the world. What can readers find in your book that will resonate with them during this era? 

We swim in a sea of generalized identity-anxiety. This is both new and old. The intensity of our identity-distress is new, but Body and Identity shows that the ideas leading to our contemporary identity crises are hundreds and even thousands of years old. Teasing out these threads of influence can empower us to decide which philosophies of identity offer us something valuable and which should be rejected.

What did you learn while writing it?

Before I began researching this book, I had no idea that John Locke would be so important to the history of identity. (Read more.)

From Angela Franks at Fairer Disputations:

Outside of academia and other sites of rebellious conformity, most people have experienced the trans phenomenon as unprecedentedly weird. Almost on a dime, we were asked to turn from viewing the sexual binary as a basic reality to viewing it as a pernicious lie perpetuated to defend positions of power. The fact that the two sexes were an accepted part of human reality until the day before yesterday was waved off by the ideologues. Dissent would not be tolerated. Many of us were left shaking our heads and asking, “How on earth did we get here?”

Cultural critics have pointed to various incubators: liberal feminism, civil-rights law, and HR departments turned irrationally inclusive; “cultural Marxism” (understood often vaguely); leftist political traditions co-opted by post-modernism; the sexual revolution, especially the Pill, and its fallout; and so forth. Many of these analyses are helpful, and sometimes they are incisively brilliant. They tend to make transgenderism a recent development—which, in fact, it is. But, as one book puts it, “The gender cult begins and ends with identity.”

Our modern identity problems didn’t begin yesterday, or a few years ago, or even with the sexual revolution. The truth is, philosophers and theologians have grappled with the thorny question of identity since the earliest days of recorded human reflection.

In this essay, I’ll explain how I—a philosophically trained theologian—came to spend the last decade researching the intellectual history of identity and, in particular, its connection to the body. That history is much longer and stranger than you might expect. (Read more.)

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'Portrait of Elisabeth Lederer'

  

From ArtNet:

The full-length portrait features a striking young woman with dark hair and pale skin, clad in a flowing, gauzy white dress, and patterned blue robe. In an unusual touch, the background features an array of small Chinese figures, dressed in traditional attire—perhaps some kind of wallhanging—and an orange and pink patterned rug.

The work comes from the collection of the late cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder, of Estée Lauder Companies, who died in June at age 92. The sale of his personal collection—minus $1 billion-worth of Cubist works donated to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art—will inaugurate the new Sotheby’s New York flagship at the Breuer Building, formerly owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, with an evening sale on November 18.

The Elisabeth Lederer painting was most recently on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Before that, Lauder lent the canvas to New York’s Neue Galerie—founded by Lauder’s younger brother, Ronald Lauder—in 2016 for “Klimt and the Women of Vienna’s Golden Age, 1900–1918,” a stunning show of the artist’s society portraits of women. (Both loans were arranged anonymously.)

The sale could obliterate the current auction record for the great Austrian Secessionist master. It stands at £85.3 million ($108.4 million) for the 2023 sale of Dame mit Fächer (Lady With a Fan), at Sotheby’s London, according to the Artnet Price Database. It is also the most expensive work of art sold at auction in Europe. (Klimt works have sold for more privately, like the 1912 work Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, which Oprah Winfrey sold for $150 million in 2016; her initial purchase of it for $87.9 million at Christie’s in 2006 was then a record for the artist.)

But Elisabeth Lederer’s price tag just might be the least interesting thing about it. Even without the sparkle of Klimt’s gold leaf-embellished The Kiss (1907–08) or Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), it is strikingly beautiful—and its backstory is nothing short of fascinating. Here are three things you should know about the historic artwork. (Read more.)

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James Comey Indicted

From Townhall:

Former FBI Director James Comey has been indicted, ABC news first reported. FBI Director Kash Patel confirmed the news in an X post.

"Today, your FBI took another step in its promise of full accountability. For far too long, previous corrupt leadership and their enablers weaponized federal law enforcement, damaging once proud institutions and severely eroding public trust. Every day, we continue the fight to earn that trust back, and under my leadership, this FBI will confront the problem head-on. Nowhere was this politicization of law enforcement more blatant than during the Russiagate hoax, a disgraceful chapter in history we continue to investigate and expose. Everyone, especially those in positions of power, will be held to account - no matter their perch. No one is above the law." (Read more.)

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What Is the Symbolism of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland?

 From The Collector:

In Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, the White Rabbit may be seen as a living embodiment of Victorian time consciousness, his frantic ticks and tocks echoing the era’s burgeoning railway timetables and factory whistles. Pictured by the original illustrator, John Tenniel, wearing a prim waistcoat and forever peering at his pocket watch, he could convey both the promise and the panic of mechanized punctuality and his anxious refrain of “I’m late! I’m late!” may encapsulate a society newly bound by schedules. More than a mere herald for Alice’s curious descent, the Rabbit might crystallize the tension between childhood abandon and the adult world’s relentless march of minutes.

 Following the White Rabbit may evoke Sartre’s idea of radical freedom, confronting Alice with a choice that defines her very being. Derrida’s notion of différance might see the Rabbit’s ever-slipping direction as avoiding any fixed meaning, his unpredictable path prompting her to question everything she thought she knew. His erratic haste could symbolize the pull of adventure, urging her to abandon familiar certainties and pursue the unknown. Through a series of bizarre encounters, Alice embarks on a journey of self-discovery, illustrating how secondary characters can provoke deeper exploration of identity. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette's Gardens

An old article but interesting. From Vogue:

In 1774, her husband, King Louis XVI, gifted her the Petit Trianon with the words, “To you who love flowers so, I present this bouquet.” Marie-Antoinette became very involved with the garden’s design, relishing each individual planting. And now, Rizzoli is re-releasing what is perhaps the garden’s most thorough documentation to date. From Marie-Antoinette’s Garden: An Eighteenth-Century Horticultural Album, written by Ēlisabeth de Feydeau, combines historical research with 18th-century illustrations of the species of flowers that were included in the queen’s garden. De Feydeau, who holds a Ph.D. in history and is an expert on fragrance, is well up to the task of undertaking this project. (Read more.)

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Charlie Kirk and the Left’s Memory Police

 From Mark Judge at Hot Air:

In her 1994 novel The Memory Police (published in English in 2019), Japanese novelist Yoko Ogawa creates a world in which memories are forbidden. When a group of people begin to lose their memories and attachment to objects and concepts, a military force called the Memory Police enforces the loss of memories. The Memory Police beat those who claim that yes, yesterday a book was in fact on the kitchen table.  

 It’s a great concept, and one that is analogous to the situation in America and the West over the last hundred years. One of the reasons the left is apoplectic these days is that they can no longer police our thoughts and memories. (We are taking advantage of this leveling of the playing field by holding an Anti-Communist Film Festival, celebrating pro-freedom films that the left wants us to forget.)

    Think about it. Liberals told us that there wasn’t any repression or famine in the old Soviet Union. They insisted that there were no communist spies in the American government after World War II. They told us that the peace, culture, and family life in the 1950s never really existed. They told us our soldiers in Vietnam were evil, and that anonymous sex with hundreds of partners was not the cause of sexual diseases. They called Brett Kavanaugh a gang rapist - and still do. They lied about Charlie Kirk or are attempting to. Liberals are our Memory Police, and have been for decades.

    On August 22, 2025, Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, was fatally stabbed on a light rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was a major story and now it isn’t - in fact, George Floyd is getting more coverage at this point. The Memory Police are doing their job. (Read more.)

From Coulombe's Company:

As Bishop Robert Barron said in his eulogy, Kirk died as he lived: with a microphone in his hand. Kirk was, to the end, a debater: patient, persistent, unwilling to meet words with anything but words. He embodied free and open debate; he did not censor others, nor did he shy away from issues of consequence. His own position was remarkably moderate: nothing he believed was not mainstream not so long ago. He was not smarmy or smug. Unlike, say, Ben Shapiro, he did not make a sport of “owning SJWs with facts and logic”. Nor did he farm resentment or peddle in what many on the online right term “outrage porn”. He eschewed violence; neither did he mock those with whom he disagreed. If he had a guiding belief (beyond his personal faith), it was that people could arrive at the truth through courageous, honest, civil discourse. This trust drove his life’s work. For that, he was murdered.

Understand this. Kirk believed that man could apprehend the truth through reason and memory, understanding and imagination. He believed that there was a truth to reach. Kirk was articulating a view that has undergirded Christian, Western civilisation (and, until fairly recently, its fractured successors) for millennia. In this vision – but not necessarily in those of the successors – there is an objective moral order and an order of meaning, both subsisting in the Creator, Who is their source and guarantor. As creatures, as children of this Creator – above all, as brothers redeemed by the scandal of the Creator upon the Cross – we are beholden to that order. We must submit to it, body and soul. Apart from it, talk of progress or improvement or law or justice makes no sense. Acknowledging this truth is the sine qua non of debate; the rest is detail (important detail, maybe, but nonetheless secondary). Yet, by the time Kirk came on the scene, this most basic truth had been driven underground.

What remained of this vision in mainstream discourse was flotsam and driftwood. “Common-sense”, perhaps, was the most intact heir. Yet even this had been unmoored from any referent beyond the political requirements of the day. Thus: common-sense gun control, common-sense school curriculum reform, common-sense COVID-19 church shutdowns, common-sense abortion of babies with Down’s syndrome, common-sense euthanasia.

We shall not now explore how this came to be. That tale is complex and long and sad, and quite beyond the scope of this essay. (Read more.)

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Dating To Break Up

 From Of Home and Womanhood:

We’ve built a culture where dating isn’t preparation for marriage.

It’s preparation for breaking up.

From the moment you’re old enough to notice the opposite sex, you’re expected to “date around,” “see what’s out there,” “have fun.” That sounds harmless enough until you realize what it really means: you’re rehearsing how to start and end relationships on repeat. You’re practicing attachment and detachment. You’re practicing being used and using others. By the time you’re actually ready for marriage, the only muscle you’ve trained is the one that walks away.

No one tells you that. No one tells you that habits in love work the same way habits in anything else do, you get good at what you practice. And most modern dating is relentless practice in the art of leaving.

The beginning of a relationship is intoxicating.

It’s new. It’s electric. Every glance feels charged, every conversation feels like an event. Your brain floods with dopamine and oxytocin, the neurochemical cocktail that tells you this person is special.

We aren’t taught that the first chapter is supposed to fade. We’re taught to fear the fade. We’re told that the butterflies are proof of love, and when they’re gone, love must be gone too. No wonder so many people spend their entire romantic lives chasing the next “first time.” (Read more.)

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Venerable Clothilde de France

Marie-Clothilde of France (1759-1802), Queen of Sardinia, was one of the daughters of Louis, Dauphin of France and Marie-Josèphe de Saxe. Two of her siblings, Louis XVI and Madame Elisabeth, as well as her sister-in-law Marie-Antoinette, died on the guillotine, after a long ordeal during which they clung to their Faith. Nevertheless, it is Clothilde who in 1808 was declared a Venerable of the Church by Pope Pius VII. The political maelstrom into which the King and Queen of France and Madame Elisabeth were thrust has perhaps created an obstacle to the public acknowledgment of their heroic virtues. Clothilde, on the other hand, although she had many sorrows, was not in the middle of the French Revolution. She was not forced to make fateful political decisions amid apocalyptic disasters. Her life, however, was not free from strife.

Orphaned as a small girl, Clothilde, like her sister Madame Elisabeth, received a pious upbringing at the hands of their governesses Mesdames de Marsan and de Mackau. Clothilde, who always had a weight problem, was nicknamed Gros-Madame as a young girl. At sixteen, she was married by proxy to the heir of the Sardinian throne, Charles Emanuel. (Charles Emanuel's sisters married Louis XVI's brothers, becoming Marie-Antoinette's difficult sisters-in-law, the Comtesses de Provence and d'Artois.)

According to an article on Charles Emanuel:

Charles Emanuel and his new wife met for the first time on September 6, 1775, when they renewed their marriage vows in the Chapel Royal at Les Echelles, Savoy. In spite of the political reasons for the union, the couple were well-matched; they shared a profound attachment to the Catholic faith. The fact that they were not blessed with children was treated by them as the will of God to which they should resign themselves. After seven years of married life, they chose to live together as brother and sister.

Charles Emanuel was deeply troubled by the French Revolution whose effects were being felt throughout western Europe. In 1793 his brother-in-law King Louis XVI was executed. The following year his sister-in-law Queen Marie Antoinette met the same fate and the armies of the French Republic stormed into his father's dominions. Charles Emanuel took solace in his faith. In 1794 he became a member of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, taking the name Charles Emanuel of St. Hyacinth.

At the death of his father, King Victor Amadeus III of Sardinia, October 16, 1796, Charles Emanuel succeeded as King Charles Emanuel IV of Sardinia. It was a most difficult time to be a new monarch; Charles Emanuel referred to his throne as a "crown of thorns"....

When Napoleon attacked Sardinia, Clothilde and Charles Emanuel had to seek refuge in Rome and later in Naples, where she died in 1802 of typhoid fever, her saintliness recognized by many, especially by Pope Pius VII. In honoring Clothilde, it can perhaps be said that the pontiff indirectly paid homage to those members of her family who had died violent deaths.

 The Venerable Clotilde de France lamented the martyrdom of her brother Louis XVI, saying:

He whom we have just lost in so unjust and barbarous a manner is certainly now our protector before God. My only consolation lies in the assurance of his eternal happiness, and the hope that he will obtain from the Divine mercy the end of our misfortunes.

—an excerpt from a letter written by Marie-Clotilde, sister of Louis XVI, to the Prince de Condé, shortly after the execution of Louis XVI Share

Trump Just Shook the United Nations With the Message Globalists Feared Most

 From Overton:

Back in 2018, when President Trump addressed the UN General Assembly for the first time, the room laughed in his face.

Today, they weren’t laughing.

Trump returned to the United Nations—and this time, he wasn’t coming to be polite. He came to put the globalists on notice.

Right out of the gate, he reminded the room that America was no longer being run by people who bowed to international pressure.

He started by touting something they never thought they’d hear on the UN floor: America’s southern border is closed.

And he said it loud and clear.

“On our southern border we have successfully repelled a colossal invasion and for the last four months, four months in a row, the number of illegal aliens admitted and entering our country has been zero.”

Then he explained why it happened and what the new policy is.

“They just poured into our country with the ridiculous open border policy of the Biden administration. Our message is very simple. If you come illegally into the United States, you are going to jail or you are going back to where you came from or perhaps even further than that.”

It wasn’t just about America. Trump turned to thank El Salvador for their help in jailing criminal aliens we’ve deported—and urged other countries to do the same.

“I want to thank the country of El Salvador for the successful and professional job they’ve done in receiving and jailing so many criminals that entered our country.”

And then he dropped a warning to every country that was listening.

“They’re all being taken out. We have no choice. Other countries have no choice because other countries are in the exact same situation with immigration.”

“It’s destroying your country and you have to do something about it.”

(Read more.)

From Hot Air:

Today, the stage was set at the United Nations Headquarters, but not before a slight mechanical mishap occurred on the way to the General Assembly room. Inexplicably, the escalator carrying the President and First Lady came to an abrupt and potentially catastrophic - have you seen the heels Melania wears? - stop just as she stepped onto the inclined conveyor.

Brakes on, stopped.

Both Trumps looked swiftly to their right, and then Melania smoothly continued up the now converted staircase, chic and cool as ever, with the president following. (Read more.)

 

From It Can Always Get Worse:

The “Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory including East Jerusalem, and Israel”, nominally an investigative fact-finding body set up after the 2021 Gaza war by the amusingly named United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), put out a report on 16 September claiming to demonstrate that Israel’s response to HAMAS’s 7 October 2023 pogrom constitutes “genocide”.

I debated whether to write anything about this for two reasons. First, a few days ago I published a long article about the political warfare waged against Israel over the last two years, which discussed in some detail how the information operation to recast Israel’s defensive war in Gaza as a “genocide” developed. Analytically, there is nothing to add: this is merely the latest phase in that operation. Second, seriously engaging feels like dignifying something that on its face deserves to be treated only with derision and ridicule. However, there are still people whose ignorance about the rancid condition of the United Nations is genuine and spelling out concretely what is wrong for such blessedly innocent souls does not seem like a complete waste of time. (Read more.)

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Blaming Eve in the Age of Porn

 From The Feminist Turned Housewife:

Porn addiction is not about lack of sex. It’s about lust, disordered desire, and self-centeredness. Telling a wife that more sex will fix his porn habit is like telling her to feed her husband more steak so he’ll stop sneaking fast food garbage. The issue isn’t hunger. It’s appetite, twisted, impulsive, addictive appetite.

We don’t tell the wife of an alcoholic, “Maybe if you poured his drinks for him, he wouldn’t go to the bar.” We recognize that enabling addiction doesn’t cure it, it makes it worse. So why would we tell wives to “enable” their husband’s lust and call it a solution?

Research consistently shows that many men addicted to porn still have regular sex with their wives, sometimes even frequent. But it doesn’t stop them. Why? Because porn isn’t about intimacy. It’s about control and fantasy.

Telling a woman to just “give him more” is blaming her for his sin. It excuses selfishness and reduces marriage to a service contract, not a covenant of mutual love and faithfulness. Porn is a moral and spiritual issue. It requires repentance, and accountability. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette and Political Correctness

People try to represent Marie-Antoinette as an early feminist but nothing could be farther from the truth. She was a very traditional woman and a strong Catholic. Nevertheless she was able to adapt the role of consort to her own gifts and to the needs of her family, as well as being an energetic and creative helper of the needy. From Crisis:

“I die in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion, that of my fathers, that in which I was brought up, and which I have always professed” wrote Queen Marie Antoinette in the early morning hours before her execution on October 16, 1793. She penned these words in her final letter, written to her sister-in-law Princess Elisabeth, the youngest sister of her husband, King Louis XVI, who had been brought to the guillotine less than nine months earlier in January. In her letter to her sister-in-law, she decried the lack of priests in France who could supply the sacraments and therefore entrusted herself to the mercy of God: “Having no spiritual consolation to look for, not even knowing whether there are still in this place any priests of that religion (and indeed the place where I am would expose them to too much danger if they were to enter it but once), I sincerely implore pardon of God for all the faults which I may have committed during my life. I trust that, in His goodness, He will mercifully accept my last prayers, as well as those which I have for a long time addressed to Him, to receive my soul into His mercy.”

In the final lines dedicated to her sister-in-law (who herself faced the guillotine less than seven months later, comforting her companions with words of pious encouragement as they approached the scaffold), the Queen stated: “Perhaps they will bring me a priest; but I here protest that I will not say a word to him, but that I will treat him as a total stranger.” At first glance, these last words of the Queen to her sister-in-law would appear shocking, especially since she had just offered her valediction as one dying “in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion.” However, a knowledge of the development of the French Revolution will help us to realize that by the time of the Queen’s execution in 1793, there were two very different types of Catholic priests (and by extension two different types of Catholics) in France.

In the midst of the French Revolution, France’s Constituent Assembly was no longer satisfied with manipulating the minds and hearts of the French people. Its design on the souls of all Frenchmen was manifested in July of 1790 with the passage of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The Civil Constitution directed the French government’s authority over Church property, dissolved remaining monastic orders, and called for the popular election of bishops and priests. The Constitution essentially made the Church an agent of the state. The Constitution seriously affected the conscience of the deeply-Catholic King Louis XVI who was induced to accept its passage. His reticence was only exacerbated when he received warnings from Pope Pius VI to reject the Constitution.

Soon after, the passage of the Constitution was not enough. The Constituent Assembly eventually decreed that all clergy must swear an oath accepting the Civil Constitution. The King wavered until finally granting his sanction to the oath in December. Perhaps more than any other, this decision would weigh on his soul for the last two years of his life; and, recognizing the gravity of his decision, he agonized over whether he could make his Easter duty and receive Holy Communion because of it the following year. He even went so far as to write to the Bishop of Clermont for guidance. (Read more.)

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Another Illegal Immigrant In Maryland Accused Of Murder

 From The Easton Gazette:

It is the third murder of a young woman by illegal immigrants in Maryland in the past three years. Rachel Morin(37) and Kayla Hamilton (20) were both murdered by illegals.

Dacara Thompson, a 19-year-old from Lanham, Maryland, was tragically found dead after being reported missing in late August 2025. Her disappearance prompted a multi-agency investigation across Maryland.

Thompson was last seen alive at a gas station in Lanham, Maryland and her car was later discovered abandoned in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Her body was found on August 31 off Route 50 in Anne Arundel County. The Office of the Coroner has not confirmed the cause of death but authorities believe she was a murder victim.

A suspect has been arrested. He is Hugo Henandez-Mendez, a 35-year-old illegal who was living in Bowie. He has been charged with first- and second-degree murder. Surveillance footage shows Thompson entering a black SUV linked to Hernandez-Mendez. The suspect is being held without bond. (Read more.)

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Cleopatra's Elusive Tomb

 From Archaeology News:

Archaeologists have unearthed the remains of a massive submerged port off Egypt’s northern coast, a discovery that could shed light on one of history’s most enduring mysteries—Queen Cleopatra’s final resting place. The find is located near Taposiris Magna, an ancient temple complex about 30 miles west of Alexandria, long thought by some scholars to be linked to Egypt’s last pharaoh.

The ancient harbor, approximately 40 feet below the Mediterranean Sea, consists of stone buildings that rise more than six meters high, with shiny floors, columns, cement blocks, anchors, and scattered Ptolemaic amphorae. The port, previously connected to Taposiris Magna, suggests that the complex was far more than a religious site. It also served as a thriving trade center, linking overland routes and Lake Mareotis to Alexandria.

This breakthrough comes from two decades of work by Dominican archaeologist Kathleen Martínez, who has dedicated her career to tracing Cleopatra’s elusive tomb. While most Egyptologists maintain that the queen was buried in Alexandria, Martínez argues that evidence points to Taposiris Magna. The temple was dedicated to Osiris, a god associated with death and resurrection, and its name—“Great Tomb of Osiris”—may hold symbolic significance.

Martínez’s theory was strengthened in 2022, when her team discovered a 4,300-foot tunnel beneath the temple ruins. Carved deep into the rock, partially submerged, and heading seaward, it contained jars and ceramics dating to the time of Cleopatra. The newly discovered offshore harbor appears to be aligned directly with this tunnel, indicating an integrated network that could have been utilized in the queen’s burial. (Read more.)

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State Banquet at Windsor Castle with President Trump

 

 

 From Hello!:

President Trump said of the special relationship, “seen from American eyes, the word special does not begin to do it justice.” 

The US leader also heaped praise on the King describing his as a “very, very special man”, listing a catalogue of his passions from the environment to architecture during a banquet staged in his honour to mark Mr Trump’s second historic state visit.
The President, whose speechwriter Ross Worthington was among guests at the banquet, added: “We're joined by history and faith, by love and language and by transcendent times of culture, tradition, ancestry and destiny. We're like two notes in one chord or two verses of a poem. Pieces of the same part, each beautiful on its own, but really meant to be played together.

“The bond of kinship and identity between America and the United Kingdom is priceless, eternal. It's irreplaceable and unbreakable.”

In his own toast, the King paid tribute to the “special relationship” saying the UK and US are now the “closest of kin”. (Read more.)

 

 From The Daily Mail:

The Princess of Wales was a vision in a couture gown by British designer Phillipa Lepley, over which she sported a full-length, hand-embroidered gold chantilly lace evening coat. She also wore earrings belonging to the late Queen and her favourite Lover’s Knot tiara.

Queen Camilla sported sapphire, from her tiara to the colour of her embroidered Fiona Clare dress.

Meanwhile, First Lady Melania Trump struck a note of modern style in an off-shoulder yellow dress with a clashing purple belt.  

As the King stood to give his speech, he toasted Britain's 'remarkable bond' with the US.

In a warm and witty speech the monarch welcomed the Trumps to Windsor Castle, highlighting the two countries' 'unparalleled partnership'.  (Read more.)

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