"Beautiful Love Story"

Henrietta Maria with two of her Children

Charles I and Henrietta Maria with Charles Prince of Wales and Mary the Princess Royal

The Queen doing Penance at Tyburn

A glowing review from Pursuing Stacie:

I have a huge love for classics. Little Women, Jane Eyre, Anne of Green of Gables…I will reach for these novels again and again, and then sigh happily about 3, 428 times throughout the story. This was exactly my experience while reading My Queen, My Love: A Novel of Henrietta Maria. It just has that rare classic, cozy, wholesome feel. Mind you, there’s plenty of suspense and intrigue. But the story is just so good!

The author skillfully fleshes out the characters and story of Charles and Henrietta, allowing her readers to sink into the novel. When I was about three chapters in, I realized with a start that I had not only completely missed my bedtime, but had forgotten altogether that I was reading a book, so engrossed was I in the story. (Have you ever read a book that feels like a movie?) (You’re about to.)

While the author set a scene masterfully, she also brought these historical characters to life in rich detail. (Might I suggest Googling their names as you meet them, by the way? So fun to put a face to the new friend that you’ve just made.) I adored Henrietta and will carry her with me always. But truly, each character was dynamic and real. From the beautiful love story to the suspense that only villainy can bring, this novel is perfect from beginning to end. (Read more.)

Another review from History From A Woman's Perspective:

Because the two of them worked hard to make their marriage work, they ended up deeply in love with each other which made it satisfying. There is plenty of drama, politics, and courtly intrigue that will engage the reader to keep turning the page! I can’t wait to read the next book in the series to learn what comes next for Queen Henrietta Maria of England! I recommend this for fans of Jean Plaidy, Alison Weir, and Philippa Gregory! My Queen, My Love is a promising start to an enthralling series on one of England’s most tragic queens! (Read more.)

My Queen, My Love and Generalissima are available from Amazon.
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Trump Announces Plan to Replace Illegal Alien Truckers with American Veterans

 From The Western Journal:

President Donald Trump kicked off a new initiative on Thursday designed to fast-track veterans into truck driving jobs.

Trump called the program “Freedom Haulers.”

“We’re taking action to replace these unqualified, migrant drivers with highly qualified American veterans,” Trump said at the White House event, flanked by a military transport truck on one side and a civilian big rig on the other.

“Under our brand new Freedom Haulers initiative, any American who has driven a heavy truck for our military will automatically be eligible for a commercial driver’s license. And it’s good-paying jobs, too,” the president added.

“We’re going to make it as easy as possible for the veterans,” Trump said.

He also noted that those who did not drive trucks in the military will still be eligible to participate in the Freedom Haulers program.

They will receive the necessary training to drive trucks in a matter of weeks. (Read more.)

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The Lamp that Burns Forever

 From Public Discourse:

In one of his most underrated but magisterial works, Perictione in Colophon: Reflections on the Aesthetic Way of Life (2000), Roger Scruton provides a blueprint of what constitutes true and timeless architecture. This is not a book of conventional philosophy, but a literary masterpiece that, in fictional form, describes the world in which we now live. Elsewhere, he describes that world as one of “normal nihilism.” Who, gazing around our city streets, would not agree with him? We have, as it were, normalized nihilism to the point where alienation from the world has become the rule for most people.  

There are many reasons for this, but one of the primary causes, according to Scruton, is that we have forgotten how to build in accordance with time-honored values. He goes further, arguing that we must understand the human urge to build in religious rather than in secular terms. That is because, as he writes:  

The stone of the temple is the earthly translation of God’s immortality, which is in turn the symbol of a community and its will to live. The temple, like the liturgy, is forever, and the community contains not the living only, but also the dead and the unborn. And the dead are protected by the temple, which immortalises them in stone. This is what you understand instinctively when you see religious architecture. And it is the sentiment from which cities grow—the tribe’s will to permanence. 

In glaring contrast, architectural functionalism “hurts both the eye and the soul, for it speaks not of us and our right of dwelling.” Hence, functional buildings “are perceived as a desecration: nothing of the sacred remains in them.” Scruton’s point is that the way we build has consequences far beyond those of conflicting tastes. Whereas innovation in music, painting, and poetry does not directly affect how we live, architecture most certainly does. It is very much a public art centrally bound up with our self-understanding. Put simply, change the way you build, and you change the self-image and values of a people.   (Read more.)

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The Sword in the Stone: A Medieval Latin Account

 

From Medievalists:

At the Abbey of Saint Denis-en-France, the Benedictine monk and chronicler Guillaume de Nangis (d. 1300) wrote a Latin World Chronicle from Creation to AD 1300. The text contains an account of the reign of King Arthur of Britain that includes the celebrated Sword in the Stone Episode. This iconic scene was not traditionally part of the ‘historical’ account of King Arthur’s biography.

The pseudo-historical Brut chronicle story of King Arthur, which originates with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae [History of the Kings of Britain] (c. 1136), has Arthur, aged fifteen, succeed to the throne of Britain without contest. Geoffrey’s Historia implies that Arthur was widely known to have been King Uther Pendragon’s son and heir apparent. The prose redaction of the Estoire de Merlin [Story of Merlin] (c. 1210), an Old French romance attributed to Robert de Boron (fl. 1191–1212), contains the earliest known attestation of the Sword in the Stone Episode, and it is built around an alternative history of Arthur’s childhood. According to it, Merlin compels King Uther Pendragon and Queen Ygraine to give up their son (Arthur) as a newborn. The enchanter sees to it that the child is baptized ‘Arthur’ and adopted by the worthy knight Sir Antor and his wife. The couple raise Arthur as their own alongside their biological son Kay. (Read more.)

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Penn State Law Dean Resigns

 From The Washington Free Beacon:

The dean of Penn State Dickinson Law resigned on Friday after a former student testified before Congress about the school’s mandatory anti-racism class, which required all first-year students to “acknowledge the reality of systemic racism.”

The school announced that Danielle Conway, who also leads the Association of American Law Schools, was stepping down as dean “effective immediately.” The move came two days after David Blackman, a Texas military veteran, said at a congressional hearing that he had left the law school over his objections to the course, which Conway created in 2020. She will remain on the law school’s faculty.

In a short press release on Friday, Penn State declined to thank Conway for her service. University provost Fotis Sotiropoulos said the school “remains fully committed to continuing to provide our law students with an excellent legal education.”

For his part, Blackman is taking a victory lap, telling the Washington Free Beacon that Conway’s departure is “a necessary acknowledgment” of the damage she caused.

“The law school shifted away from traditional, objective legal training in favor of forced ideological orthodoxy,” Blackman said. “This erosion of professional neutrality hurts the legal academy, the bar, and every student forced to comply.”

He added that Penn State should “take the logical next step” and eliminate the required course. (Read more.)

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'The Sun Also Rises' at 100

 From First Things:

The Sun Also Rises shows men and women trying to salvage a life they can call “good” from the wreckage of their own hopes, and the ruin of an entire civilization. Those aureate obscenities now proscribed had meant a great deal before Verdun and the Somme and Passchendaele. They had defined the things men owed to Caesar and to their comrades and to themselves, and decreed what was worth killing and dying for. After the war’s pointless carnage, the vocabulary of the moral life shrank to the bare essentials.  

Hemingway offers his own definition of the good under the new dispensation—the word that his narrator, Jake Barnes, uses dozens of times to connote the union of physical pleasure and moral rightness: You feel what is good, you know it without thinking about it, as though simple sensation were the only guide to right living. “It felt good to be warm and in bed”; “It was a good dinner. Food had an excellent place in the count’s values. So did wine. The count was in fine form during the meal. So was Brett. It was a good party”; “You paid some way for everything that was any good. I paid my way into enough things that I liked, so that I had a good time.” A good time, for this expatriate crowd attending the fiesta in the Spanish town of Pamplona, means good fishing, good bullfighting, a good hotel room, a good meal, lots of good drink, and good drinking companions.

What it emphatically doesn’t mean, at least for Jake, is good loving. The beautiful Brett, Lady Ashley, loves Jake, and Jake loves her; but Jake suffered a war wound that disqualifies him from sexual pleasure, so she takes up with several perfectly wrong men one after the other, including a superb matador fifteen years younger than she, who takes a bad beating from a previous lover of hers adept with his fists. (This jilted and jealous lover, once the middleweight boxing champion of Princeton, is an anti-Semite’s dream so odious that the poisonous caricature nearly spoils the novel.) Brett is feeling quite virtuous, between spasms of self-hatred, after she decides to leave the love-besotted torero for his own good. “You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch,” she says. “It’s sort of what we have instead of God.” “Some people have God,” Jake replies. “Quite a lot.”  (Read more.)

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Henrietta Maria: Constructing and Reconstructing Early Modern Royal Motherhood and Confessional Identity

 
From Dr. Amy Saunders:

This article examines representations of Henrietta Maria’s (1609-1669) Catholicism and motherhood in a variety of artistic mediums and analyses how these objects are now reinterpreted within heritage sites and museum spaces in England. Henrietta Maria’s patronage, agency, motherhood, pregnancy, and confessional and foreign identity are often omitted from these heritage reconstructions despite the centrality of these themes within the artworks themselves. Her confessional and foreign identity places her in a liminal position within heritage spaces, where she is situated in opposition to Protestant queen regnants and queen consorts who are represented as more admirable or ‘successful’, due to their politics, identities, and activities. Furthermore, this article suggests that the continuation of a Protestant monarchy in England into the twenty-first century has influenced these representations with Henrietta Maria’s narrative not aligning to retrospectively applied ideals of the later royal family. (Read more.)

My novels on Henrietta Maria, HERE and HERE.

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The Left’s Imaginary Food Stamps “Crisis”

 From AMAC:

SNAP enrollment has dropped by about 4.5 million people over the past year—an 11 percent decline. While critics call this a "crisis" and blame the Trump administration for stripping benefits from needy families, the reduction largely reflects new work requirements and stronger anti-fraud measures under the One Big Beautiful Bill. This article examines the data behind the debate and explains what's really driving the change in food stamp participation.

To most Americans, a significant drop in the number of people on food stamps is a positive development. But to the left-wing outrage mob, it’s cause for all-out panic and one of the most absurd fits of anti-Trump hysteria to date.

According to recent government data, as of July 1, approximately 4.5 million fewer people are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) compared to the same time last year – a reduction of about 11 percent. Still, the nearly 42 million people enrolled in SNAP is much higher than the 35 million on the dole in 2019. (Read more.)

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The Art of Conversation

 From Return to Order:

Conversation is a vast theme. Outlining some principles that should guide our conversations can help us better understand the topic. This will help us see the true value and scope of this important art. I hope our discussion will not be a lecture but a conversation about how to converse.

First, the principle that should guide our choice of topics and our comments should be the good of others. We must seek to do good for those with whom we converse. In other words, conversation is a precious means of apostolate, that is, a means of spreading the Faith to others. Thus, our attitude towards conversation must be like that of an apostle who acts with zeal and passion.

 Second, we have a vast field to work in since the characteristics of the Church are unfathomable. God is infinite, so we have always had much to say about the Church and God. Conversations aimed at spreading our thinking are an important part of our mission as Catholics. We converse to bring souls closer to the Catholic Church and Christian civilization. (Read more.)

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Bellevue

Bellevue was a country estate originally built by Louis XV for Madame de Pompadour. It was on a hill overlooking the Seine and the forest of Meudon; the view was said to be truly magnificent. In 1775, after he had become king, Louis XVI gave Bellevue to his maiden aunts Adélaïde, Victoire, and Sophie, the surviving daughters of Louis XV, known as Mesdames Tantes. Madame Louise having already entered the Carmelite monastery, Louis thought it would be good for his other aunts to have a retreat from the court, a house they could call their own. For all their genuine piety, Mesdames Tantes had manipulated and gossiped about Marie-Antoinette in the early years of her marriage, coining the term L'Autrichienne, an epithet that would later be taken up by the Revolutionaries. It probably helped maintain the peace at court for Antoinette to be at her Trianon while the aunts were at their Bellevue.

According to the Comte d'Hézecques, who in his capacity as a page at Versailles witnessed the inner workings of the court:

The position of Mesdames at Court being obscure and unsatisfactory, they were seldom seen there. They spent the chief part of the year either at Bellevue, on that splendid height that commands the proud city and the charming country around it; or at the Hermitage, a little garden at the other end of Versailles, by the road leading to Marly.

Madame Adelaide and Madame Victoire were the only survivors of the four daughters of Louis XV who outlived their father. The third, Madame Sophie, had died two years before ; and the other, Madame Louise, had quitted the world in one of those sudden resolutions that can only be inspired by great religious fervour, or by a quick and ardent spirit that will not be satisfied by smaller sacrifices—resolutions that always cause astonishment to men of the world, whatever be their cause....

Mesdames the Aunts only came to Paris in the winter, as they had been able to stay at Bellevue up to the 5th of October. Seeing that they were of very little use to their nephew, unable to enjoy his confidence, and fearing measures opposed to their religious opinions, they at last decided on going to Rome. Possibly in their solitude, standing in a position whence they could form a better judgment of the course of events, theirs was the surer presentiment of all the trouble that hung over their family; therefore, they separated themselves from it for life, but they could not prevail on Madame Elizabeth to leave her brother and accompany them. . . . No doubt Mesdames did not find themselves happy at Rome. The news of the fall of the throne of their fathers and the sorrows of their family came to disturb the peace they might have enjoyed in the Eternal City. They could at least carry their tears and prayers for their guilty country to the foot of the altar, till the day when they were forced to quit the hospitable city that had received them, by conquests that the noble head of the Church could neither arrest nor foresee. So they left Rome to retire to Naples; and, after several changes of their place of refuge, Madame Adelaide had the sorrow of seeing her younger sister die at Trieste. Her own mournful existence was shortened by grief, and she soon died herself at Klagenfurth.—Recollections of a Page, by Comte d'Hézecques, pp. 79-82.

Here is furniture, originally from Bellevue, that once belonged to Madame Adélaïde.

Here is a view of the orangerie and formal terrace at Bellevue. The palace was looted during the Revolution. In 1823, it was demolished.

In the 1780's Mesdames Tantes had Mique create an English-style garden at Bellevue, complete with a tower, a lake, a mill, a dairy and a grotto, similar to what Marie-Antoinette had at Trianon. It is fascinating that they were so censorious of the Queen and yet imitated her in that for which she was greatly criticized, the creation of fanciful gardens. The tower and some other structures of the gardens of Bellevue survived well into the twentieth century; little is left of it today.



Here is a picture of the grotto of Mesdame Tantes, which is just about all that is left of the Bellevue estate. Sic transit gloria mundi.

(Photos from Le Boudoir de Marie-Antoinette) Share

Librarians Could Face Criminal Charges

From Todd Starnes:

“According to your library’s website, this event is a ‘queer-led story time with an LGBTQ+ theme’ which is directed to toddlers and preschoolers,” she wrote in the letter. She said local residents had contacted her office concerned about the event.

Hanaway said that furnishing any pornographic material to minors is a crime and so is displaying explicit sexual material in any location that may be readily seen.

“Protecting the safety and wellbeing of minors is one of my top priorities,” the attorney general wrote. “While your library has the right to determine its own programming, I am fully prepared to take appropriate action should any of these programs violate Missouri law. (Read more.)

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Has Hitler’s Order for the Holocaust Been Discovered?

 From It Can Always Get Worse:

To summarise briefly: why the Holocaust happened is straightforward—because Adolf Hitler wished it to—but how and when the decision was taken is debated. The debate turns largely on whether there was a Führer Order for the Holocaust. While no such document has ever been found, this is not surprising. There was extensive destruction of Nazi documentation, and Hitler routinely conveyed orders verbally anyway, so, if there was a Führer Order, it was almost certainly never written down in the first place. Accentuating the difficulties, the surviving records are written according to a euphemistic official Nazi discourse that leaves room for interpretation, and Hitler—like Lenin—deliberately cultivated uncertainty within the regime about his role in the worst crimes.1

Historians are broadly divided into two camps, those who argue for a moment between July and December 1941 when a Führer Order was issued, and those who argue there was no “moment”, but rather an iterative process between Hitler at the centre and various lower officials in the occupied territories, where the Führer endorsed, rather than originated, the escalatory steps of the Shoah.

In assessing the evidence historians are working with in coming to these divergent conclusions, one aspect I highlighted was:

SS operatives involved in implementing the Final Solution … have uniformly testified that their orders came directly from Hitler. There is no reason to doubt the SS men were substantially correct, that Hitler stood behind the fundamental decision for the Holocaust and every decision of significance as it escalated. But it does not settle the question of a Führer Order because none of the SS officials heard Hitler’s verbal instruction(s) personally; they all heard of Hitler’s will through [Heinrich] Himmler. And Himmler did not specify to his subordinates whether, during his increasingly frequent face-to-face meetings with Hitler from the summer of 1941 onwards, the Führer had approved or initiated genocidal measures. (Read more.)

 

Will there be another genocide? From Welcome to Absurdistan:

Fourteen years ago I published a book one chapter of which entirely dealt with the forests fires curently raging across Canada choking the lungs of Americans from Maine to Chicago. It was published by Harper Collins in New York, and received a good old fashioned push by their PR department.

I woke up at 4 am to get on drive time in Texas and Atlanta. I must have spoken to 30 million people - in theory - the PR kept me up on the numbers each radio host had, I spoke to the big names, including the sainted Dennis Prager which pleased HC no end. In each interview I hit the major highlight of the book - the most shocking crime against people and nature - outlining how “natural regulation” installed by the UN FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization) had made the forests thick, desiccated: visualize a whole bunch of unthinned little trees leaching all the water from the soil, fire ladders growing up the trees, just waiting for a lightning strike or stupid “activist” kid to trigger conflagration.

All over the world, these policies, these regulations had been forced in a series of iniquitous meetings where entire nations were placed under the rule of weedy, stupid, vicious idiots who called themselves “scientists” employed in Turtle Bay, who had, courtesy of the Rockefellers and a bunch of other malignant families - basically the ones holding the debt of the New York Federal Reserve - crowned themselves Lords of Nature. And, as I began to understand, planned to take it all from us. (Read more.)

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The Six Loves of James I

 

 

In the last few decades some really amazing authors have begun writing about the Stuart dynasty. The abundance of Tudor biographies and novels have led to an interest in the family which succeeded them on the throne of England. While the Tudors were wily politicians, they were continually challenged when it came to male heirs. Because Margaret, the oldest daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York, married James IV of Scotland, her Stuart descendants became the heirs of the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland and of the principality of Wales. James VI of Scotland, son of the murdered Mary Stuart, was de facto heir of the last Tudor, Elizabeth I. He became James I of England. Gareth Russell's fascinating biography of this brilliant and complicated man is a must-read for anyone venturing into the upheavals and achievements of the seventeenth century. Mr. Russell is known for his painstaking research of primary sources as well as for his witty and entertaining prose. This must be at least the tenth work among his several books and plays that I have read.

James I was a series of contradictions. A peaceful man, he was haunted by violence from the womb, when a Scottish lord held a pistol to his mother's pregnant stomach during a palace coup. He survived the violent deaths of both his parents as well as attempts upon his own life, in addition to kidnappings. Yet what damaged him most was the harsh, unloving and even brutal treatment he received as a motherless child from those entrusted with his upbringing. When he finally had a his own wife and family, he loved his Anna, and saw to the thorough education of his children. He was nevertheless constantly becoming infatuated with a series of handsome young men. 

A scholar of Hebrew and Greek, James presided over the translation of the Bible into the English, known as the "King James version." Famous for writing works of theology, he was also notorious for rowdy and boisterous banquets at which he became drunk, while making and laughing at coarse oaths. A persecutor of Catholics, he also insisted on the Anglican liturgy being uniform and dignified, with vestments and candles, which the Calvinists saw as papist. A prosecutor of witches, as a matter of conscience, he would then scandalize the court by showing public affection for his boyfriend of the moment. It was James I's elevation of his favorite, George Villiers, as Duke of Buckingham, while treating him practically as a member of the Royal Family, that prepared the way for Buckingham to be a fixture at the court of James' son, Charles I. Unfortunately, the role Buckingham played in the government of Charles, particularly as perceived by the people, weakened the royal authority.

From Folger Shakespeare Library:

“Elizabeth was king, now James is queen.” So went the joke circulating around London in the 17th century. While Elizabeth I became an icon for transgressing traditional gender roles, her successor is all too often overlooked or even mocked for the same reasons. Yet James I was a multifaceted ruler who led a fascinating life—and his personal relationships only add to that complexity.

For generations, historians avoided labeling the intimate relationships between James and his “favorites” as romantic. But after combing through James’s personal correspondence, historian and author Gareth Russell has uncovered compelling evidence of five significant love affairs with men. His award-winning book, The Six Loves of James I, reveals how these relationships—and his marriage to Queen Anna of Denmark*—guided the course of his life and reign.

James I’s story is a turbulent one, filled with assassination attempts, kidnapping, and witch hunts. It’s also a story of a man who loved “indiscreetly and obstinately,” for better or for worse. In this episode, Gareth Russell explores the untold history of a complicated king through the lens of the great loves of his life. (Read more.)

 

The Six Loves is available HERE.

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Catherine Herridge Uncovers Shocking Revelations About The Biden Family

 From Zero Hedge:

Herridge, a veteran Emmy-winning investigative reporter, has previously pursued stories on the Hunter Biden laptop, the Biden family's foreign business dealings, and related corruption allegations - reporting that put her at odds with CBS leadership and the broader media consensus.

In February 2024 she was among those laid off in a round of cuts. CBS then seized her reporting files, including materials involving confidential sources. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Herridge described the seizure in stark terms: "When my records were seized I felt it was a journalistic rape."

She added that "CBS News' decision to seize my reporting records crossed a red line that I believe should never be crossed by any media organization" and that "When the network of Walter Cronkite seizes your reporting files, including confidential source information, that is an attack on investigative journalism."

She has maintained that she simply "reported out the facts of the story. I called balls and strikes." The network eventually returned the files under pressure from the House Judiciary Committee and her union.

Earlier, during the 2020 campaign, the Biden team had already labeled her a "partisan, rightwing hack." Her treatment fits a pattern of institutional pushback against journalists who refused to look away from the Biden family's financial ties.

Those ties have been documented for years. House Oversight Committee investigations, led by Chairman James Comer, obtained bank records and witness accounts showing Chinese Communist Party-linked money flowing to Biden family members.

Comer stated that the documents demonstrated the family had received funds from CCP-connected entities and that family members "attempted to sell access & influence around the world." (Read more.)

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The Agony of The Odyssey

 From Paul du Quenoy at Chronicles:

“Hahaha. Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” Lawrence, Massachusetts, high school teacher Heather Levine tweeted in 2020, responding to a post from a fellow “scholar-educator” who called Homer’s epic poem “trash.” The Wall Street Journal reported that the teachers were part of an online group of left-wing activist educators who tried to get Homer’s epic and other classics of Western literature banned from classrooms because of their supposedly racist, sexist, and ableist contents.

These undoubtedly enlightened purveyors of knowledge have yet to register any reaction to this summer’s blockbuster release of Sir Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic. Nolan’s film, which he co-produced with his wife Emma Thomas and for which he wrote the script, debases The Odyssey so cheaply that Hellenophobic New England schoolmarms might well be pleased, assuming they are not too triggered to see the film.

Nolan was on tap to direct Troy, an adaptation of Homer’s Iliad executed more than two decades ago by Wolfgang Petersen, but the studio eased Nolan out of the project, giving him Batman Begins as a consolation prize. Nolan has said in interviews that at the time, he felt ill-prepared to tackle The Iliad. He only conceived his Odyssey project in 2024, after the stunning success of Oppenheimer, his disjointed biopic of the troubled atomic bomb scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer, which won seven Academy Awards. According to interviews, Nolan kept the subject of his next film secret for nearly a year while he read several translations of Homer’s epic, along with various related media, apparently including comic book adaptations.

Perhaps naturally, Nolan contextualized The Odyssey within his larger oeuvre of feature films, many of which, including Memento, Interstellar, and his Batman trilogy, relate existential quests involving emotionally tortured men who suffer from familial loss. From that perspective, Homer’s epic—a hero’s 10-year voyage home from a distant battlefield to a faithful but beleaguered family—may have seemed a natural fit. Nolan had the time, money, and opportunity to make a stirring and searching literary adaptation of great significance, if for no other reason than that a serious film adaptation of The Odyssey hasn’t been undertaken since Italian director Mario Camerini’s flawed 1954 attempt in technicolor, Ulysses, starring Kirk Douglas. (Read more.)

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Narrative Icons

 

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

One of the most useful distinctions made by people who analyse art is between an image that simply presents something, and an image that tells a story. A portrait of a king, a still life of a bowl of fruit, a simple landscape, or an icon of Christ Pantocrator asks us to contemplate a single subject. They are essentially static images, like a single object in a dark room under a spotlight. Nothing is happening, and nothing is about to happen. It’s just Him and you.

But iconography is about making a visual statement about some eternal reality, even when the image itself is a story being told. We are all familiar with the single-figure icons of course, but there are narrative icons as well. The Nativity icon is a good example of this, where a single image will have several elements of a story presented as if they’re all happening at the same visual “time”1. The format here is to have the most important thing - the Nativity itself - in the centre, with all the side adventures going on around it.

This is called “continuous narrative,” in which the same characters appear multiple times within a single image to depict successive moments in a story. Time is compressed into one pictorial space. But instead of reading left-to-right like a comic strip, the viewer follows the action throughout the composition.

This technique goes back to classical Roman art (for example, Trajan’s Column) and was taken east by Byzantine artists, where it became especially common in manuscript illumination, fresco cycles, and some icons. (Read more.)

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Blame Democrats, Not ICE, for Recent Deadly Shootings

 From Chronicles:

In the wake of recent shootings in Texas and Maine, President Trump’s mass deportation campaign hit another wall. Over the past week, two men, one from Mexico and another from Colombia, were killed during encounters with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents during traffic stops.

ICE says that both of the two men, Joan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, were in the country illegally, but that they were not the intended targets of ICE’s operations. Critics have used these cases of mistaken identity to impugn ICE and Trump’s efforts to secure the nation’s interior. In response, ICE temporarily paused vehicle stops across the country.

However, President Trump on Wednesday used TruthSocial to reverse that policy, writing, “[W]e must be strong, tough, and smart, and we CANNOT give up one of I.C.E.’s most important and effective Crime Fighting tools, THE TRAFFIC STOP!”

Fatal shootings by ICE, while unfortunate, are rare. Considering the scale of ICE’s operations, the number of fatalities during these inherently dangerous operations has been very low. ICE agents have been making hundreds of arrests each day across the nation for the last 18 months, and ramped up to 2,000 arrests per day in June. Despite the intensity of its operations and the fierce public backlash, there have been only 11 deaths related to ICE enforcement operations during Trump’s second term beginning January 2025. That is compared an average of 800 people killed in the U.S. every year by police and other law enforcement officers. And yet, left-wing newspapers like The Guardian quote pro-immigrant activists about “terrifying new levels” of ICE violence. (Read more.)

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Cholera in the Mid-1800's

We recall the death of Charles X from cholera as told in the novel Madame Royale. From Geri Walton:

These 22 rules were then summed up by the author:

“By timely adoption of simple means such as these, Cholera or any other epidemic will be made to lose its venom; so true is it that ‘internal sanatory arrangements, and not quarantine and sanatory lines, are the safeguards of nations.'”

While Victorians may have thought this good advice, the bacterium responsible for Cholera was not isolated until 1854 by an Italian anatomist. Even then its exact nature was still unknown. Ultimately, attempts at understanding cholera fell upon the shoulders of a German physician and pioneering microbiologist named Robert Koch. Koch determined in 1884 that the causative agent of cholera was Vibrio cholerae. Despite his discovery and despite Cholera inoculations for humans occurring in 1885 and a Cholera vaccine being developed in July of 1892, Cholera pandemics continued to exist into the early twentieth century. (Read more.)

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Isabel of Castile and Chess

From Nobility:

Today, the Queen is the most powerful piece on the board, but it was not always this way. Nor was this piece always called “Queen.” It was the King’s “adviser,” so in the Kingdom of Bengal (India), it was called the mantri (minister); in Persia, the Vazīr (vizir); in the Arabic world, Wazīr/Firz (vizier); in Turkey, vezir; but an improvement was made when chess was brought to Catholic medieval Europe. Players began referring to this piece as the “queen,” since its initial position was right next to the king, making them the royal couple. The queen was one of the weaker pieces though. She moved just one square at a time, diagonally at that, making her less powerful than today’s bishop.

All this changed with Isabella the Catholic’s dramatic intervention in the siege of Baza, in 1489, seven years into her ten-year war of reconquest of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada.

Her husband, King Ferdinand of Aragon, was one of the best generals of his time and he had excellent generals helping him in this siege, but it all seemed “a bridge too far.” The city was too powerful, defended by a strong, 20,000-man garrison, and well provisioned to withstand the longest siege. The Catholic troops and artillery seemed woefully disproportional to the task and after six months of siege warfare, the King called his generals to a council of war, and they recommended lifting the siege and withdrawing. Before striking camp, however, Ferdinand sent a messenger to Isabella who was then at Jaen, 90 miles away. She sent back word that a retreat would demoralize all Spain. They should continue the siege and she would go herself to their assistance.

The Queen’s arrival at the camp sent the Crusaders into transports of joy and enthusiasm, while inside Baza, the Muslim garrison despaired, seeing in her arrival the fatal seal of impending doom. Three weeks later they surrendered and were given all the honors of war.

As the news of Baza’s fall was carried everywhere, the Crusaders’ enthusiasm at Isabella’s arrival at their camp reverberated throughout Spain, and among the manifestations of joy, the rules of chess were changed, with the Queen becoming a most powerful piece, sweeping and majestic in her moves. A few years later, Luis Ramírez de Lucena enshrined the new rules in Repetición de Amores y Arte de Ajedrez, the oldest printed book on chess we have today, and the new rules were here to stay. (Read more.)

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Persecution: Dems Target Christians Again

 From The Western Journal:

Roman Catholic nuns are engaged in a legal battle with New York over a state law encouraging terminally ill patients to end their lives. Becket, a law firm that tackles cases of religious freedom, filed suit last Friday. The group is asking a federal court to block the law before it goes into effect Aug. 5. Just The News said the groups represented in the suit are numerous: Carmelite Sisters for the Aged and Infirm, Little Sisters of the Poor, the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne, Missionary Sisters of St. Benedict, Diocese of Rockville Centre and its Bishop John Barres, and other orders.

The outlet noted the law in question is the New York Medical Aid in Dying Act.

A short description of the law describes it as a way for “a terminally ill, mentally capable adult with a prognosis of 6 months or less to live to have the option to request, obtain and decide to ingest medication to die peacefully in their sleep if suffering is unbearable.”

Becket said the groups it represents cannot prescribe suicide drugs in accordance with their faith, nor can they direct patients in how to obtain them or facilitate a suicide in any way. Becket argued the law will require them to do so.

“Beginning August 5, any healthcare provider who declines to prescribe suicide pills could still have to tell terminally ill patients about their ‘right’ to kill themselves, help them meet the requirements for obtaining suicide pills, and direct them to a provider willing to prescribe the lethal drugs. Refusal invites significant fines, license revocation, or even time behind bars. (Read more.)

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The Sin of Cultural Misrepresentation Does Not Apply to Western Culture

 From Chronicles:

If any proof is needed to show that the entire progressive edifice is nothing but a strategically deployed façade designed to subvert Western culture, one needn’t look very far to find it. Still, a recent article published in Variety goes out of its way to demonstrate it. 

The piece focuses on Disney’s new live-action version of the children’s story Moana. The original 2016 animated film is a classic hero’s journey—and notably, it’s one of the few modern Disney movies that didn’t give in to the prevailing trope of treating its female lead like a girl boss to demonstrate that she is, thereby, worthy of the audience’s respect. But instead of just letting a great Polynesian story remain a compelling adventure on its own terms, Disney treats the culture the original film depicted like it’s too fragile to exist in a live-action version without the intervention of DEI box-ticking commissars. 

Instead of art, we now get identitarian policing. Experts like Dr. Grant Muãgututi’a were brought in to micromanage every piece of minutiae—from the scenery, communication, and dance moves to Moana’s specific mannerisms and traditional Mãori tribal tattoos. Everything had to be vetted—in Muãgututi’a’s words—“to ensure the tradition of respect within the culture was accurately reflected.”

Now, I have no problem with minority actors being cast in roles that authentically represent their backgrounds. We’ve come a long way, and I think we can all agree that it was ridiculous—and, admittedly, pretty hilarious—it was to see Sean Connery “Japanified” in his James Bond role or Fisher Stevens affect an exaggerated Indian accent in Short Circuit. 

But for the past decade, the Western canon has been at the mercy of revisionists and ideologues who would rather shoehorn identity politics into these stories than create anything original. This has led to the relentless race-swapping of established historical and mythological characters—yet this progressive obsession with “representation” only ever seems to flow in one direction. (Read more.)

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King Vidor and 'Duel in the Sun'

 It seems Duel is based on a novel in which Laura Belle is an alcoholic. That explains a lot. My main criticism of the film is that Laura Belle does not protect Pearl from Lewt. From SteynOnline:

The film's reputation as a (doubtless unintended) camp classic led to Paul Bartel making a loose parody of it in 1985 using Vidor's film's mocking nickname as his title, with the transvestite Divine starring alongside onetime matinee idol Tab Hunter. And yet Bartel's movie never manages to be more outlandish than Vidor's original, no matter how hard it tries.

From the outside Duel in the Sun looks like a western: there are cowboys and railroads and cattle barons and saloons and six-shooters and ranches and gunfights under the blistering sun. But there's so much more going on under the hood – a Rube Goldberg contraption of genre and style built of lurid Technicolor that makes most of John Ford (My Darling Clementine was released the same year) look like Samuel Beckett. (Read more.)

My thoughts on the film are here:

Perhaps too much of Selznick's personal life, namely his affair with the leading lady, spilled over into the production, heightening the melodrama. Yes, the film was initially banned by the Catholic Church and in several Midwestern towns. However, compared to what is now shown on prime time television, commercials included, Duel in the Sun seems wholesome and almost pristine. Since it is often shown on TCM, I thought it would be worth revisiting, especially in terms of the family dysfunction which creates an atmosphere conducive to disaster. Pearl's father Scott Chavez and Lewt and Jesse's mother Laura Belle had been in love in their youth but had been unable to marry each other. It was after the War Between the States and southerners were reduced to poverty so Laura Belle had to marry money. Both Scott and Laura Belle end up in unhappy marriages but each are too gentle to stand up to spouses who were either negligent or abusive. Unable to control his slutty wife, Scott should have at least sent Pearl to be educated at a convent or a school rather than let her run about in the streets. Laura Belle married the wealthy Yankee senator Jackson McCanles, who never got over the fact that Laura Belle deep down always loved Scott. The Senator takes Laura Belle away to his ranch, where he proceeds to torment her with sneers and reproaches. It seems they worked out their relationship problems by each taking over one of the boys. While Laura Belle raised Jesse to be a gentleman, the Senator spoiled Lewt, taking pleasure in his wild ways, almost as a way to get back at Laura Belle. As the film opens, the McCanles household is a veritable tinderbox of angers, resentments and passions, just waiting for a spark like Pearl Chavez to walk in and make it explode. One aspect of the story which irks me more and more as I grow older is how Laura Belle fails to protect Pearl from Lewt. Pearl is a conflicted child, as anyone can see at first glance. She is torn between her wanton mother and her noble father; she is torn between trying to be a lady like Laura Belle and being a floozy like her mother; she is torn between love for upright Jesse and her lust for no-good Lewt. She is obviously the type of teen age girl that a mother keeps an eye on. Laura Belle should have kept Pearl right at her side rather than let her loose on the ranch. Pearl was her own cousin and had been entrusted to her care. Since predatory Lewt made it clear that he was interested in Pearl without respecting her, Laura Belle should have taken Pearl upstairs to live. Instead, Laura Belle allows Pearl to sleep downstairs with the cowboys where it is easy for Lewt to ravish her. How can any woman be so simple-minded? But to give Laura Belle some slack, she was raised not to think ill of others and, as time went on, she taught herself to ignore the ugly side of life. She tried not to see what Lewt was becoming, and would not acknowledge that he was a reprobate until blood had already been shed. Such blindness on the part of a mother can be costly indeed. (Read more.)

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House Passes Bill to Ban Congressional Stock Trading and Require Voter ID

 From Big League Politics:

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed legislation that would prohibit members of Congress and their immediate families from trading individual stocks while also requiring photo identification for voting in federal elections.

The bill passed by a vote of 232-198, with 13 Democrats joining Republicans in support.

The legislation combines two major Republican priorities: cracking down on congressional stock trading and implementing a nationwide voter ID requirement for federal elections.

The measure, known as the Stop Insider Trading Act, was introduced by Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) and seeks to prevent lawmakers from personally profiting from information obtained through their positions in Congress.

Under the bill:

• Members of Congress, their spouses, and dependent children would be prohibited from purchasing publicly traded stocks.

• Lawmakers would be required to publicly disclose planned stock sales at least seven days before they occur.

• Violations would carry penalties of $2,000 or 10% of the transaction’s value, whichever is greater, along with forfeiture of any profits earned from the trade.

Steil argued the legislation would help restore public confidence by ensuring elected officials cannot use nonpublic information for personal financial gain. (Read more.)

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Awaiting the Birth of the Silicon Antichrist

 From Chronicles:

“Technology,” we are often told, “is neither good nor bad, but merely what we make of it.” But what if technology is taking advantage of our complacency to make something of us?

What if, in fact, there really is a “ghost in the machine”? The phrase was coined by British philosopher Gilbert Ryle in 1949 as part of a critique of Cartesian dualism. While Ryle would no doubt have scoffed at the notion that our increasingly complex machines might come to embody autonomous minds, the idea has begun to proliferate in the age of AI and is frequently embraced by our Silicon Valley savants.

Already in the 1960s, media guru Marshall McLuhan popularized the idea that electronic technology was quickly becoming an extension of human consciousness, radically realigning our self-awareness and reshaping the social order. If McLuhan sometimes expressed mild reservations about the long-term implications of electronic media, the French thinker Jacques Ellul, a contemporary of McLuhan, was a trenchant critic of what he called “the technological illusion.” As Ellul wrote in The Technological Society (1954), “Technique has become autonomous, it has its own laws, its own evolution, and its own demands.”

Paul Kingsnorth’s latest book explores the implications of Ellul’s assertion, especially in light of the emergence of a world in which the internet has become the dominant political and social reality. In Kingsnorth’s analysis, the “Machine” (always capitalized) becomes an all-encompassing term describing the malign evolution of modernity under the influence of technological change. Artificial Intelligence, in his view, is simply the endgame in a development that began with the Industrial Revolution, though its roots in Western thought date back to Duns Scotus and the late Middle Ages. The era of the great revolutions, the rise of Progressivism, the emergence of the nation-state, capitalism, Marxism, feminism, the sexual revolution—Kingsnorth believes all of these and more are profoundly implicated as carriers of, or as products of, the tyranny of the Machine. In short, technology, which has been with us since the invention of the wheel, has in the modern era become what philosopher Eric Voegelin might have termed a “second reality” that threatens to devour our very humanity. (Read more.)

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French Royal Family on Porcelain

A 1788  vase with painting by Pierre-Philippe Thomire from the Château de Versailles. From left to right are Louis XVI, Louis-Charles, Duc de Normandie, Marie-Antoinette, Madame Royale, the Dauphin Louis-Joseph and probably Jean Amilcar, the African boy brought up  and educated by Marie-Antoinette. Share

The Norma Desmond Revolutionaries

 From Unlicensed Punditry:

There is something patently ridiculous about watching people (many highly privileged) in the freest, most prosperous, most tolerant country in the world wrap themselves in the ragged costumes of revolutionaries.

I happen to believe that most, if not all, self-identified and so-called “revolutionary” movements in America today are fraudulent. In an age and a country where everybody can afford to hold luxury beliefs, the people leading or people close to the people leading these movements are actually privileged dilettantes cosplaying revolutionary characters.

The recent wave of ridiculousness started with a certain Justice Democrat bartending lassie from Westchester surrounded by her gaggle of supporters from the Island of Misfit Toys. Now these “democratic socialists” have added more comedic value to the show.

America has no shortage of self-described dissidents, resisters, radicals, abolitionists, insurgents, and movement leaders who speak as if they spend their days dodging secret police and composing manifestos by candlelight in some damp cellar. They borrow the vocabulary of people who opposed absolute monarchies, communist dictatorships, military juntas, and theocracies as they invoke the moral authority of men and women who faced prison, torture, exile, and death merely for saying aloud what everyone around them knew to be true.

The problem is that most American revolutionaries face no such danger. In truth, many of them are wealthy in their own right, are children of privilege, or from a “protected class” that has been funded and/or supported by the very society and systems they oppose.

They organize publicly, raise money, and give interviews. They sell books, teach university courses, operate nonprofit organizations, collect speaking fees, post revolutionary slogans on social media, and in an absolute denial of irony, appear on cable television to explain, at length, how thoroughly they have been completely silenced. (Read more.)

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Best Picture No Longer Means Best

 From The Enterprise:

Christopher Nolan may have made The Odyssey to adapt Homer, but Universal also had to make it for the Academy’s confidential diversity, equity, and inclusion spreadsheet. Before the Academy will even consider a 2026 film for Best Picture, the studio must document compliance with it’s identity-based standards covering race, sex, and gender identity of the actors, crew members, interns and even executives. Nolan’s cast contains many excellent performers. But under the Academy’s rules, excellence alone is no longer the measure, and that changes how we should read every casting announcement coming out of Hollywood, including this one.

Start with what the rules actually say, because most moviegoers have no idea they exist. Since 2024, a film cannot compete for Best Picture unless its distributor submits a confidential Representation and Inclusion Standards Entry form, known as the RAISE form, and demonstrates compliance with 2 of 4 standards. Standard A concerns what appears on screen. It can be satisfied if at least one lead or significant supporting actor submitted for Oscar consideration belongs to an Academy-approved list of racial and ethnic groups, or if at least 30% of secondary and minor actors come from at least two categories that include women, racial minorities, LGBTQ+ people and people with disabilities, or if the story itself centers on one of those groups. Standard B counts the crew, requiring qualifying department heads, or at least six technical workers from designated racial groups, or a 30% overall crew threshold. Standard C counts paid interns and apprentices from the designated groups. Standard D counts senior marketing and distribution executives by race, sex and sexual orientation. Of course, none of standards give a picture any credit for hiring white men - they are specifically excluded.

Notice what this is. It is not a mission statement or an aspiration. It is a numerical eligibility gate, with thresholds, categories and a filing deadline. For films released between July and December of 2026, the RAISE form is due November 12, 2026 at 5 p.m. Pacific. The form is confidential. The Academy knows which demographic evidence each studio claims. You do not, and you never will. (Read more.)

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Restoring a House in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val

 

 

 

From Home and Garden:

‘I am very loyal,’ says the landscape gardener Jinny Blom. ‘If I make a promise, I’ll keep it.’ That is precisely how she ended up being the custodian of a house in a small village in south west France. Before Jinny’s mother Françoise died in 2013, she asked her daughter to look after her home in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val. ‘It meant a huge amount to her,’ Jinny adds. ‘I feel she belonged there and so it became somewhere with real resonance for me.’

Her mother moved to the historic village, which is surrounded by a rugged limestone plateau at the bottom of a gorge on the Aveyron River, on something of a whim in the early 1990s. ‘It was a funny choice,’ says Jinny, ‘as she was very gregarious, and it was desolate and parochial back then.’ Things have, however, changed significantly since. Today, the inhabitants of the charming village include a Parisian interior designer and a former member of Yohji Yamamoto’s fashion design studio. As Jinny puts it, ‘There is a lot of nice stuff happening.’

Françoise sounds like a very wonderful character. Born in Madagascar, where her French father was a spice and timber trader, she was sent to school in England during the Blitz: she arriving speaking only Malagasy patois and didn’t see her parents again until she was an adult. ‘My mother was more English than anyone you’ve ever met,’ notes Jinny. ‘She spoke like the Queen and had her hair done like her. She was, to all intents and purposes, the Queen, except that she was – without a shadow of a doubt – French, because she wore couture, which nobody else did in Royal Leamington Spa, where we lived.’ (Read more.)

 

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Hundreds of Non-citizens Voted in NJ Elections Since 2023

 From The New York Post:

Approximately 400 non-citizens cast ballots illegally in New Jersey elections since 2023 after more than 6,000 immigrants were wrongly added to the Garden State’s voter rolls, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill admitted Tuesday.

Despite the mortifying disclosure, Sherrill managed to use her press conference about the fumble to take a swipe at President Trump.

When asked about the possibility of Trump using New Jersey as an example of vulnerable elections, she declared: “I think that Donald Trump has done more to undermine free elections in this country than certainly anyone in my lifetime, including [Russian President] Vladimir Putin.”

She added that Trump “has zero credibility on the issue of election integrity.” (Read more.)

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