Gone for a Soldier

 
If you don a scarlet coat at the price of your conscience, the color will only remind you of the wound in your own soul! If you sign away the faith of your fathers, all lesser goods will be forfeited too! ~from Gone for a Soldier by Avellina Balestri

From Amazon:

Young Edmund Southworth could not have foreseen the path his life would take upon befriending Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, British military veteran and parliamentarian. As Catholic recusants from the north of England, Edmund’s once noble family has struggled to survive for centuries in the shadow of the Anglican ascendancy. But General Burgoyne offers him the chance to put past humiliations behind him by joining the Church of England and donning a scarlet coat as an officer of King George III. Although his conscience is uneasy, Edmund embarks upon Burgoyne’s March to subdue the American revolutionaries by splitting the colonies in two. He finds unexpected love in the arms of Abby Vanderkamp, a supporter of American independence, who will do anything to free her father from a British prison hulk or, failing that, strike a blow for the hard-pressed rebel cause. As the British advance through the New York wilderness devolves into increasing brutality and instability, Edmund will have his already divided loyalties tested to the breaking point under the influence of this hostile land which presents him with new challenges and opportunities alike.

 

Gone for a Soldier is the first volume of a trilogy called All Ye That Pass By about the War for American Independence from the point of view of the young British soldier, Edmund Southworth. Edmund is from a devout Catholic recusant family in England, "recusant" being the name given to those who paid the exorbitant fines levied on all who refused participation in the Church of England. His father having died, Edmund is the head of his household, comprised of his bitter mother, his saintly sister and a few servants. Forbidden because of his Faith from any profession but that of country gentleman, Edmund's family struggles with poverty, while valiantly determined to fulfill their duties to their tenants and to the poor. Miss Balestri quite authentically depicts the hardships Catholics faced in eighteenth-century England, weaving into the narrative stories of saints, martyrs, Jacobites and highwaymen, so that the reader receives a glimpse of the larger picture.

Then the vibrant, unforgettable character of "Gentleman Johnny" Burgoyne sweeps into the story, taking Edmund under his wing. A womanizer and bon vivant, Burgoyne is nevertheless a loyal friend and a brave general. With a dollop of bullying and an ocean of charm, Burgoyne convinces Edmund that he needs to join Burgoyne in North America in the fight against the colonists by becoming a soldier. The problem is that military careers are only available to Protestants, so Burgoyne talks Edmund into renouncing his Catholic Faith and receiving the bread and wine in a midnight act of apostasy. Burgoyne dismisses it is as a small matter but Edmund is tormented by his betrayal of the Faith of his fathers, The author explores the anguish of violating one's conscience, making the reader pray and hope  never to be in Edmund's circumstances. It is, however, but the beginning of his adventures in America, where he and Burgoyne are joined by quite the colorful cast of characters. Miss Balestri once again proves her mastery of history, and her ability to bring it alive in intriguing storytelling.

About the author:

Avellina Balestri is a Catholic author and editor based in the historic borderlands of Maryland and Pennsylvania. Her stories, poems, and essays have been featured in over thirty print and online publications. She has published two books: "Saplings of Sherwood", the first book in a Robin Hood retelling series, and "Pendragon's Shield", a collection of poetry. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Fellowship & Fairydust, a magazine inspiring faith & creativity and exploring the arts through a spiritual lens. Under its auspices, she hosted a literary conference at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, England, commemorating the legacy of J.R.R. Tolkien. She also has the honor of representing the state of Maryland at The Sons of the American Revolution National Orations Contest. Avellina believes that the Trinitarian divine dance and Incarnational indwelling mystery are reflected in all things good, true, and beautiful, and that the image of God is wondrously woven into every human heart. These themes are at the forefront of the stories she chooses to tell.

For more information about the author and her various projects, please visit the following websites:

www.fellowshipandfairydust.com 

www.avellinabalestri.com

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Illegal Aliens Commit More Crime Than Citizens, The Data Democrats Are Hiding

 From Amuse on X:

Public debate over immigration and crime often proceeds as if one empirical claim has been decisively settled. We are told, with confidence and repetition, that illegal immigrants commit crime at lower rates than American citizens. The claim is treated as a conversation stopper. Once uttered, it is meant to end inquiry. If the data show lower rates, then immigration enforcement is unnecessary, even unjust. Yet this posture assumes something that has not been demonstrated. It assumes that the data measure what they purport to measure. When all crimes committed by illegal aliens are counted, including immigration offenses, crimes obscured by deportation, and offenses suppressed by systematic underreporting, the rate of criminality attributable to illegal immigrants far exceeds that of citizens. The apparent lower rate is not a discovery about behavior. It is a byproduct of selective counting.

Policymakers are trained to ask a simple question before accepting any statistical claim. What exactly is being counted? Consider an analogy. Suppose a hospital wishes to know whether a new medication reduces heart attacks. It counts the number of patients currently in cardiac wards. If, however, a substantial number of patients who suffer heart attacks are immediately transferred to another facility and removed from the hospital’s census, then a snapshot of current ward occupancy will systematically undercount the true incidence. The hospital will report success, but the apparent success will be an artifact of removal, not a reduction in harm.

Almost all immigration and crime literature relies on an analogous snapshot. The most widely cited studies use incarceration data from the Census or the American Community Survey. They ask who is in prison at a given moment and then compare incarceration rates across native born citizens and noncitizens. But incarceration is a stock measure, not a flow measure. It tells us who is physically present in custody at the time of the survey. It does not tell us who committed crimes and was then removed from the country. (Read more.)

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Why Do Bagels Have Holes?

 From Mental Floss:

The toughest bagel question might seem like what cream cheese to choose, but there’s a bigger mystery baked right in: Why the hole? It can feel like wasted real estate; prime carb territory that could easily hold more dough—or at least stop your toppings from falling through. As it turns out, that empty center isn’t an accident, and it’s not just a stylistic flourish. The bagel hole has been linked to medieval monarchs, religious restrictions, and some surprisingly practical kitchen science. In other words, there’s a lot more to that little circle than meets the eye.

Marie Antoinette may not have actually said “Let them eat cake,” but Queen Jadwiga, a powerful Polish monarch, might well have said something like “Let them eat bagels.” Jadwiga, whose reign shifted the balance of power in 14th-century Europe, is credited with popularizing obwarzanek—a traditional Polish ring-shaped bread and the precursor to today’s bagel. The story goes that she chose this simple bread over decadent pastries during Lent, and her people followed suit.

Another possible origin story takes place in 17th-century Poland, but with different key players. The country was a cultural melting pot, and Jewish immigrants faced restrictions, including bans on making bread, a holy Christian food. Once legally allowed to bake again, Jewish bakers had to find a way to distinguish their loaves from Christian bread. Their solution? Boil the dough and put a hole in the middle. (Read more.)

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Mary Henrietta of England

The daughter of Charles I and mother of William III.

Wishing to imitate the French tradition of the firstborn daughter of the King being known as Madame Royale, the French-born Queen consort wanted to do something similar for her own daughter. So, in 1642 King Charles I gave Princess Mary the title of Princess Royal, establishing a new tradition in the British Royal Family. Even as a tiny child, the new Princess Royal was immediately the center of marriage negotiations. Originally, King Charles had wished his daughter to marry into the Spanish Royal Family to secure a long-lasting alliance between Britain and Spain. His own father had tried to see him married to a Spanish princess as King James had hoped that Britain could act as the great peace-maker between the Catholic and Protestant powers as the wars between the two sides were tearing Europe apart. This was a long-standing ambition of the House of Stuart, to emerge as the monarchy that restored peace, if not unity, to Christendom. (Read entire post.)

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President Trump Brilliant in Fourth State of the Union Address

 From AMAC:

President Donald Trump delivered his fourth State of the Union Address and the first of his second term Tuesday night before a packed House chamber, minus several dozen Democrats who chose to boycott the speech. In just under two hours, the longest State of the Union in modern history, Trump laid out a sweeping case that America is not simply recovering from the chaos of the Biden years, but entering what he repeatedly described as a “Golden Age.”

From his opening line, the tone was unmistakable. “Our Nation is back – bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before,” Trump declared, setting the stage for a speech that was equal parts report card, policy blueprint, and patriotic revival.

With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence just months away, Trump framed the moment in historic terms. “This July 4th, we will mark two and a half centuries of liberty and triumph, progress and freedom in the most incredible and exceptional nation ever to exist on the face of this earth,” he said. “And you’ve seen nothing yet, because we are entering the Golden Age of America.”

That sense of momentum carried through the first half of the address as Trump ran through what could fairly be called his second-term “greatest hits.”

One year ago, he reminded the country, he inherited “a nation in crisis—with a stagnant economy, inflation at record levels, a wide-open border, horrendous recruitment for military and police, rampant crime at home, and wars and chaos all over the world.” Today, he argued, the turnaround is undeniable.

“Today, our border is secure, our spirit is restored, inflation is plummeting, incomes are rising fast, the economy is roaring, our enemies are scared, our military and police are stacked, and America is respected again,” Trump said. (Read more.)

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The Madrid Codices

 From Euro News:

Every year Spain celebrates one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century for studies on Leonardo da Vinci. On 13 February in 1967 the National Library of Spain conserved among its collections two original manuscripts of the Renaissance artist and engineer that had remained unnoticed for more than a century. The so-called Madrid I and II codices (source in Spanish),identified as Mss. 8937 and Mss. 8936, are part of a set of scientific notebooks written by da Vinci between the end of the 15th and the start of the 16th century. They were rediscovered when the American researcher Jules Piccus, who was working on the revision of the inventories of the institution's manuscripts, identified the relevance of some volumes that had not been correctly attributed.

According to official information from the National Library, the codices contain hundreds of pages of annotations and drawings devoted to statics, applied mechanics, gear systems, hydraulic machines, geometry and fortification studies. Unlike his paintings, these manuscripts allow us to observe Leonardo's intellectual process:calculations, diagrams, hypotheses and corrections that show his experimental method. Codex Madrid I, dated mainly in the 1490s, is considered one of the most important treatises on mechanics by Leonardo, with detailed studies on the transmission of motion and the functioning of mechanisms. Codex Madrid II, dated slightly later, brings together research related to civil and military engineering, as well as topographical studies and hydraulic projects. (Read more.)

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A Primer on Georgian Fashion

 

How did people really dress in the Wuthering Heights era? From InStyle:

Another year, another classic literature adaptation on the big screen. The latest book getting the Hollywood treatment? Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s gothic novel about the unbridled passions of free-spirited Catherine Earnshaw and her tortured soulmate, Heathcliff. Emerald Fennell directs the ultra-stylized interpretation of the story, which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi.

When the first trailer dropped for the film, Robbie’s on-screen attire caught the Internet’s attention. A see-through bridal look even went viral. Wuthering Heights is set between 1771 and 1802, leading fans to wonder: was the real Georgian era that daring?  

 Not quite. The film’s costume designer, Jacqueline Durran, told British Vogue she and Fennell weren’t aiming for historical accuracy. “Our dates are all confused in the sense that we’re not representing a moment in time at all—we’re just picking images or styles that we like for each character,” she explained.

Wondering what the novel’s characters may have worn in real life? Here’s a breakdown of how people dressed in the late Georgian era, the historical period that backdrops Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Before putting on their gowns and coats, Georgian women had to assemble their base layer of clothing. First came a shift or chemise, typically made of linen, according to the Victoria & Albert Museum. Then, they put on stays—boned undergarments for shaping and offering structural support.

“A pair of stays was a sort of early example of a corset,” curator Anna Reynolds explained in a video promoting the Royal Collection Trust exhibition Style & Society: Dressing the Georgians. “They shaped the body and they provided support, a bit like a modern bra. They fasten at the back with a single lace.” Next came the ever-important petticoat, an underskirt which was often purposely exposed when worn with a robe à la polonaise—more on that later. 

Finally, there was the matter of shaping the skirt to achieve a fashionable silhouette. By the late 18th-century (aka the Wuthering Heights era), wide panniers—side hoops extending from the hips to dramatically spread out a skirt—had fallen out of fashion everywhere but the court, per FIT’s Fashion History Timeline. Taking their place? Rumps, or bum pads filled with cork, which created the appearance of an exaggerated posterior. (Read more.)

 

There is a trend of anachronistic costumes in historical films, although Netflix's The Leopard has dazzling and relatively authentic costumes, to show it can be done. From The Guardian:

 For some, this current mood for anachronisms is being overstated. Helen Walter, costume and visual historian at the Arts University Bournemouth, isn’t “sure it’s as big or as unprecedented a shift as people are making it out to be”. Costume design, she says, “often says much more about the people who are making it than the original setting … it always says something about the time that it’s being made.”

True historical accuracy is also not actually possible. According to Waddington: “Every period thinks that they’re doing the period, but they never really are [there are] always telltale signs.”

When Oscar-winning costume designer Sandy Powell did Shakespeare in Love, she says “all of the silhouettes were the correct period cuts for all the clothing, but you can’t necessarily find period-accurate fabrics because they’re just not made in the same way now”. Powell remembers upsetting somebody by using an art deco lace to make an Elizabethan collar. “I thought, ‘Well, I don’t care,” she says. “It looks good. And actually, this isn’t a documentary’.”

Costume, says Walter, “like any other art form is not immune to fashion and general cultural trends”. But designers will ultimately be led by the film in question. “I do whatever feels right for the piece,” says Powell. Her upcoming work on The Bride! starring Jessie Buckley, is true to period but takes an anachronistic mood to “how clothes are worn more than the actual items of clothing”.

“It’s almost as if the punk that we know from, let’s say, the 70s or 80s, existed in the 1930s. What would it look like?” Often working with a lot of artistic license, with The Bride! she “had free rein to have fun and go mad with it but all within the period.” (Read more.)

Where was Heathcliff from? From Down to Earth:

Today, Liverpool is celebrated globally as the birthplace of the Beatles. However, the city is much more than that. Located strategically at the estuary of the Mersey river as it ends into the Irish Sea along the northwest coast of England, Liverpool once ruled the seas.

“The city was a center of commerce, and its famous docks formed a continuous line of sea wall for six miles. It surpassed all other English ports in terms of foreign trade particularly in Asia, Africa, and the East in general.  In fact, by mid-century, by any criteria, Liverpool was England’s “first port of empire,” writes Diane Robinson-Dunn from the University of Detroit in Lascar Sailors and English Converts: The Imperial Port and Islam in late 19th-Century England.

In Racial Hybridity and Victorian Nationalism: 1850-1901, Alisha Renee Walters writes that, “Susan Meyer underlines that in 1769, “the year in which Mr. Earnshaw found Heathcliff in the Liverpool streets, the city was England’s largest slave-trading port.” She also suggests that Heathcliff may be “the child of one of the Indian seamen, termed lascars, recruited by the East India Company.”

The story of the Lascars begins with the establishment of trade links between Mughal India and Stuart England. The East India Company was established in 1600 AD after being given a royal charter by Queen Elizabeth I. Later, Thomas Roe, Emperor James I’s envoy, led a mission to India and had an audience with Emperor Jehangir in Agra. This led to the opening of English (later British) ‘factories’ across the subcontinent.

British trade with the subcontinent meant that Indian goods like spices, cotton, silk, jute, indigo, tea, porcelain and opium, made their way to docks in London, Liverpool, Hull, Cardiff, Glasgow and other British port cities. By the 1720s, Bengal alone contributed over half of the East India Company’s imports from the Indian subcontinent.

This trade in goods opened passages to migration between India and Britain.

The term ‘Lascar’ is derived from the Urdu/Hindustani and ultimately Persian word ‘Lashkar’ meaning ‘army’. The Portuguese, great rivals of the British, first used it and it soon found its way into the British lexicon as well.

The Lascars really entered the picture after 1757. That year, the British under Robert Clive won the rich province of Bengal after defeating Siraj ud Daulah, its Nawab.

According to the portal South Asians in Britain, “South Asian seafarers, seamen and mariners, known as ‘lascars’, were first hired to work on ships by the East India Company in the seventeenth century. As the Company increased its control of territory in India and trade and merchant shipping expanded during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they were recruited in ever increasing numbers. Employed on so-called ‘Asiatic’ or ‘Lascar’ Articles, which determined their rates and condition of employment, lascars were a source of cheap labour for shipping companies, who paid them significantly less than their European counterparts.”

The heyday of the Lascars was from the 1850s to the 1950s. That was the time when steam ships replaced sail ships. European sailors were not willing to work in the gruelling conditions aboard steamers. The labour shortage thus created was largely filled by Lascars.

Once they arrived in British ports though, the Lascars were in for a tough time. They were often abandoned to fend for themselves and often ended up destitute on the streets.

This was the situation especially before the Revolt of 1857, when the East India Company employed Lascars. Post the Revolt, the Company was abolished and the British Crown took over.

Many Lascars settled in British port cities where they worked as crossing-sweepers, ran lodging-houses or set up cafes and restaurants.

South Asians in Britain notes that “Men from diverse religious, regional and cultural backgrounds signed up as mariners mainly in the large port cities of Bombay and Calcutta. Initially recruited from the coastal regions of East Bengal, Gujarat and the Malabar coast in south-west India, as demand for their labour grew, workers from more rural areas of India, such as Assam, Bengal, the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab also signed up.”

In East Bengal, the Lascars mainly came from the Sylhet region. In his book, Bengali Settlement in Britain, author Faruque Ahmed notes that it was mainly Bengali Muslims, rather than Bengali Hindus, who became Lascars as religious injunctions forbade Hindus from crossing the Kaalapani.

Sylhet today is located in the northeastern corner of Bangladesh. At the time of the Partition of the Subcontinent, it was a part of Assam. (Read more.)

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Maryland Sheriffs DEFY Governor’s New State Ban on Partnering With ICE

 From WLT Report:

In Maryland, Democrat Gov. Wes Moore has enacted a law to ban local law enforcement partnerships with ICE. But, it doesn’t seem to be going how he expected. The new law has nine sheriffs in the state absolutely furious! They say that they will defy the ban and continue cooperating with immigration authorities. Wicomico County Sheriff Mike Lewis called the ban “the biggest betrayal to law enforcement and public safety” that he has ever seen....

Specifically, the new law banned 287(g) partnerships with ICE.

But, it doesn’t prevent local authorities from notifying ICE when an illegal alien is arrested.

Fox Baltimore has more details:

Maryland sheriffs who previously participated in the federal 287(g) program say they plan to keep working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in other ways, even after the governor signed a ban on formal 287(g) agreements. Although the new law eliminates formal memorandums of understanding (MOU) with ICE, it does not end all cooperation with the agency.

(Read more.)

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The Suicide of Neanderthals

 From EL PAÍS:

In his latest book, the paleoanthropologist Ludovic Slimak recounts how, as a young man, he spent his time observing people as he played the bagpipes in a kilt on the dirty streets of Marseille. Driven by an unconscious impulse, he had decided to master the instrument, and he succeeded, even leading a famous band in France. Then his first child was born, he found himself traveling from gig to gig, and eventually, he gave it up. But he was able to earn his PhD with the money he made from music.

The French scientist has been able to spend the last 30 years observing and studying one of the most decisive moments in the history of evolution: the encounter between our species and the Neanderthals, our closest human relatives. One of his latest discoveries is Thorin, a Neanderthal who lived around 42,000 years ago, very close to the moment of extinction. From then on, Homo sapiens became the only human species on the planet.

 In his new book The Last Neanderthal: Understanding How Humans Die, Slimak, 52, reflects on the reasons for the disappearance of these human cousins, and what it reveals about ourselves. “It’s a sad book,” he underscores, because despite the latest evidence that Neanderthals controlled fire, created cave art, and had sex and children with our own species — leaving a trace of their DNA in our genome — this scientist from the French National Center for Scientific Research believes they went extinct in isolation and abandonment. Slimak answers EL PAÍS’ questions via videoconference from his beautiful home, where he lives with his wife and two children, halfway between Toulouse and the Pyrenees. (Read more.)

40,000-year-old Stone Age symbols may have paved the way for writing, long before Mesopotamia. From Phys.org:

Over 40,000 years ago, our early ancestors were already carving signs into tools and sculptures. According to a new analysis by linguist Christian Bentz at Saarland University and archaeologist Ewa Dutkiewicz at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte (Museum of Prehistory and Early History) in Berlin, these sign sequences have the same level of complexity and information density as the earliest proto-cuneiform script that emerged tens of thousands of years later, around 3,000 B.C.E.

Using a computational approach, the team examined over 3,000 signs found on 260 objects to reveal insights into the origins of writing. Their findings, which have been published in the journal PNAS, were clear—and surprised even the researchers.

Paleolithic objects dating back between 34,000 and 45,000 years bear mysterious sign sequences—often repeated lines, notches, dots and crosses. Many of these artifacts were discovered in caves in the Swabian Jura, such as a small mammoth found in the Vogelherd Cave in Lone Valley in southwestern Germany.

A Stone Age human carved the mammoth figurine out of a mammoth tusk and carefully engraved it with rows of crosses and dots. Other artifacts found in the Swabian Jura are also etched with signs. (Read more.)

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The Spell of Posey Rings

Mary of Great Britain and Ireland

From Country Life:

Gold rings with poesies (‘little poems’) — poésie being the Old French for ‘poetry’ — quickly became the single most popular type of jewellery in the country. They were exchanged by lovers, would-be lovers, family members and best friends, but their most common use was as a betrothal or wedding ring. Henry VIII gave a posy ring to Anne of Cleves inscribed: ‘God send me well to kepe.’ William of Orange gave one to Princess Mary inscribed: ‘I’le win and wear you if I can.’ Jewellers used to keep a stock of blank rings, and booksellers promoted inspirational handbooks, such as Loves Garland or Poſies for Rings, which was published in 1624.

I was still in my teens when a friend of my mother’s showed me his collection of posy rings. I was transfixed by their beauty — the soft, almost pure yellow gold, the finely wrought decoration (flowers, leaves, hearts and other symbols) and the elegant script, but what really fascinated me were the inscriptions. ‘I like my choyce.’ ‘True love appears/In midst of tears.’ ‘God has brought to pass that which unlikely was.’ It was as if I were listening to the voices of the long-dead givers and receivers. 

The physical appearance of posy rings changed over time. Lombardic script was replaced by Gothic script, which, in turn, gave way to Roman capitals and then italics. Earlier rings carried much more decoration, too. Niello — a hard black paste — was used to fill in the letters and the costlier rings were enamelled in bright colours. The language of courtly love was, of course, Norman French (‘sans de partier’ or ‘without parting’) although some poesies were in Latin (‘Non Auri Sed Amor’ or ‘not gold but love’) and others in a sort of proto-franglais (‘Autre ne wile and evere you best’, which hardly needs translating). Later, they were almost all in English. (Read more.)

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FBI Internal Emails Reveal Biden White House Coordinated with DOJ on Mar-a-Lago Raid

 From The Gateway Pundit:

Fox News on Friday obtained internal FBI emails proving that the Biden White House coordinated with the Justice Department to raid Mar-a-Lago. Biden’s FBI raided Mar-a-Lago in 2022 and seized boxes of records from Trump’s Florida estate. More than 3 dozen machine-gun-toting agents descended on Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, and by November, Biden’s DOJ appointed a special counsel to investigate the documents stored at the Florida residence.

The raid came after the National Archives (NARA) visited Mar-a-Lago in early 2022 and demanded documents from Trump. Court documents revealed that Biden’s FBI authorized the use of deadly force during their raid on Mar-a-Lago, which was authorized by US Attorney General Merrick Garland. Corrupt FBI agents released staged photos of the ‘classified’ documents laid out on the floor of Mar-a-Lago. (Read more.)

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Roundup

 From Tierney's Real News:

In simple terms, spraying glyphosate at the end of the season works like a chemical “off switch” to kill the crop and help it dry down more quickly so it can be harvested on schedule. This practice is called pre‑harvest application. It is used on some wheat acres, especially in cooler or wetter northern climates, but it is not universal on all U.S. wheat.

Why do farmers do this?

• In cold or wet years, wheat can stay green and “wet” too long. Killing the plant helps it dry faster so the farmer can harvest before rain, frost, or snow.

• Sometimes part of a field is ripe while another part is still green. Spraying helps the entire field reach a similar dryness so the combine doesn’t plug with green stems.

• Late‑season green weeds can tangle in machinery and slow everything down. A pre‑harvest spray helps “burn down” those weeds and smooths out harvest.

Farmers wait until the wheat is mature – meaning the grain is fully formed and the moisture in the kernels has dropped to around 30% or less. A common “thumbnail test” is pressing a fingernail into a kernel; if the dent stays, the grain is mature enough for a pre‑harvest treatment.

At that point, a sprayer applies either true desiccants like diquat or systemic herbicides like glyphosate over the field. Contact desiccants kill green growth very quickly and dry the crop in a few days; glyphosate works more slowly and is technically labeled for weed control, but in practice it also helps the crop finish drying and ripening in bad conditions.

Once the plants are brown and brittle and grain moisture is down near storage levels (around 14%), the combine goes in and harvests.

Glyphosate has been around since the mid‑1970s, but its use as a late‑season tool became more common in the late 1980s and 1990s and expanded in the 2000s in places like Canada, the northern U.S., and the U.K., where early cold and wet weather can shut down the season fast. (Read more.)

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Marie-Antoinette's Journey of Faith

I have always felt that Maxime de la Rocheterie's description of Marie-Antoinette is one of the best:

She was not a guilty woman, neither was she a saint; she was an upright, charming woman, a little frivolous, somewhat impulsive, but always pure; she was a queen, at times ardent in her fancies for her favourites and thoughtless in her policy, but proud and full of energy; a thorough woman in her winsome ways and tenderness of heart, until she became a martyr. (The Life of Marie-Antoinette by M. de la Rocheterie, 1893)

Marie-Antoinette spent the first fourteen years of her life in Austria, worshiping in Rococo churches and listening to the music of Haydn and the Italian composers. Architecture and music in that time and place celebrated the glory of God in the beauty of His creation. As Queen, her desire to promote beauty around her, especially in the lives of those whom she loved, was an outgrowth of the culture in which she was raised. She loved theater, acting, opera, ballet, painting, gardens and everything that enhanced the loveliness of the natural order. Hers was a piety that was loving, gentle and courteous, but real and unflinching nevertheless. Antoinette's approach to faith was joyful and non-judgmental, free from the rigorist approach of Jansenism that so tainted a great deal of French piety in the years preceding the Revolution. Nevertheless, even as a young bride, she had the moral courage to defy the king in regard to Madame du Barry.

Antoinette was the fifteenth child in a family of sixteen. It is known that the young Archduchess Antonia was not an outstandingly pious child, but she was carefully taught her faith. Her mother, Empress Maria Teresa of Austria was a deeply observant Roman Catholic, who prayed novenas with her children and took them on pilgrimages. She instilled in her daughters the importance of being faithful wives and staying at their husbands' sides, no matter what.

The Empress also taught young Antoinette how to play cards before sending her to France, knowing that at the French court just like the Austrian court, gambling was rife and if a princess did not know the ropes she would lose all her money. Antoinette's mother's devotion to God did not blind her to the realities of life as a royal for which she tried to prepare her daughter, although many say that Antoinette's youth and naïveté made the task difficult. Unfortunately, the teenage Antoinette became addicted to gambling, a passion that she later overcame with her husband's help.

When I look back at my own youth I cannot be too hard on the imprudences of Antoinette as a girl. Whatever mistakes she made, she later paid for, bitterly. Her faith was practical and manifested itself in her extensive charities, including a home for unwed mothers. While her generosity to the poor is famous, it is not as widely known that she was a patroness of the Carmelite order, and visited the monastery where her husband's aunt was a nun, once a year. She made many personal sacrifices on behalf of the poor and encouraged her children to do so. She assisted at daily Mass, confessing and receiving Holy Communion on a regular basis,and lived, to all appearances, as a Roman Catholic in good standing.

After the death of her mother and loss of two of her children in the 1780's, Antoinette became more noticeably devout, growing closer to her pious sister-in-law, Madame Elisabeth of France. While under house arrest at the Tuileries palace, the two connived at getting non-juring priests, (i.e., those who were faithful to the Pope), into the chateau for secret Masses and confessions. It is supposedly the time when a few historians claim she had a romantic rendez-vous with Count Axel von Fersen. I think not. The atmosphere at the Tuileries was more like the catacombs than Dangerous Liaisons.

Before her death, when her children had been taken from her, her little son abused and her husband slain, the queen again sought prayer, the sacraments of the Church, and affirmed in writing her loyalty to the "Catholic, Roman and Apostolic religion." The priest who received her last confession in the Conciergerie later publicly affirmed these facts.

The more I continue to discover about Antoinette, for history is a gradual voyage of discovery, I do not regret having painted her as I did in Trianon. If I could write it again, there is more that I would wish to add about her goodness, courage, nobility, love for God and the people of France. My fear is that perhaps I did not do justice to a very great but much maligned Queen. As historian John Wilson Croker expressed it:

We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with-- if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves-- something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny-- that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings. (History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844)

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The Big Stink

 From Direct Line News:

The Potomac River, the central artery of our region, is now contaminated with E. coli, MRSA, and other dangerous pathogens after the failure of the Potomac Interceptor. This is not a minor spill. It is a public health catastrophe that experts compare with the Exxon Valdez and BP Deepwater Horizon disasters when measured by raw pollutant volume and impact area. What happened to the nation’s capital is not an unavoidable act of nature. It is a failure of leadership.

And to understand how we got here, it helps to remember that this is not the first time Gadis has been connected to a water system in crisis.

Before taking charge at DC Water, Gadis held a senior executive position at Veolia North America, the consulting firm hired by Flint in 2015 to assess its drinking water system. Flint residents had already been complaining about foul odors, discoloration, and illness. Veolia’s review was supposed to identify problems and recommend solutions. Instead, the firm delivered an assessment that failed to warn the public about lead contamination in their homes. This failure later became the focus of lawsuits filed by Flint families and by the State of Michigan. The Attorney General accused Veolia of professional negligence. Veolia defended itself in court, but the record speaks clearly. The firm did not sound the alarm that Flint desperately needed.

Now the Washington region is living through its own version of that nightmare. Under Gadis, DC Water allowed the Potomac Interceptor to weaken and collapse. The result was the release of millions of gallons of untreated wastewater into the river that serves as the drinking water source for large parts of the region. Because the spill was not contained quickly, it spread downstream, threatening communities from Georgetown to Northern Virginia to the Maryland suburbs. (Read more.)

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“This Cursed Phenomenon We’re Experiencing”

 From The European Conservative:

Bothelford’s Gone, Edward McLaren’s recently published novel, proves the struggle is ongoing. While not outright banned, this novel examining Britain’s twenty-first-century national shame has thus far been suppressed in all the standard ways. Though Amazon is known for endeavoring to sell everything, the book is unavailable from Amazon UK (though the American parent company sells it in the U.S.). As of this writing, Oldspeak Bookshop in Suffolk is the novel’s only confirmed UK retailer. Thus, an American writer is reviewing a British book, on a British topic, published by a small American publisher.

This is not a fictional account of the Rotherham crimes. The plot extends to the present day. It names the 2014 Jay Report and Rotherham itself. The fictional Bothelford, then, portrays the ongoing failures of late-stage liberal Britain, the malignant society that endures after its authorities did precious little to address Rotherham. 

McLaren illustrates numerous defects of this society, perhaps to his detriment. We encounter attitudes to Tucker Carlson and Brexit, COVID lockdowns, and creeping technology. The narrator alludes to President Trump without naming him. A transgender-identifying character plays an unexpected role. McLaren accurately captures UK polite society, if this reviewer’s interactions with the British professional-managerial class are any indication. However, any readers from the ‘respectability’ camp—if they are willing to approach the grooming-gang subject in good faith—likely won’t read until the end. 

Bothelford probably would have benefited from a first-person narrator. Too often, especially in the first half, the narrator tells rather than shows. We might give McLaren the benefit of the doubt. Do Western readers have a reference point for grooming-gang Britain without being told? Official narratives have insisted it is conspiratorial or extremist to talk about the subject. (“Tell me why The Financial Times isn’t talking about it, if it’s such an issue?”) 

Can an author like Michel Houellebecq more easily employ a first-person narrator because readers can better comprehend his atomized, sexually depraved subjects? After all, McLaren argues pornography desensitizes young British minds to the crimes occurring in their midst. “He had been subjected to the mulching of manhood such that the English women, the little girls, would have no defence from the likes of him. It was deliberate. It must have been deliberate, all along.”

The novel gathers momentum in the second half. Bothelford’s corrupted criminal-justice, education, and local-government ecosystems are especially resonant, even if accounts of the crimes and resultant suffering are less so. The protagonists are born into Houellebecquian emptiness, not complicit in it. (Read more.)

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Louis XVI: A King Maligned

Some biographers, in seeking to change public opinion about Marie-Antoinette, attempt to redeem her at the expense of her husband, King Louis XVI. Louis-Auguste is portrayed as a repressed, impotent, dull-witted, indifferent husband, who drove his wife to gambling, dancing and spending exorbitant amounts of money as an outlet for her thwarted impulses. Stefan Zweig, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, was one of the first to impart to the public the image of the sexually frustrated teenage princess, which successive authors continue to promote to this day. 

The drawback of the Freudian theory is that it does not explain why others at the French court, who were enjoying unmitigated pleasures of the flesh, were spending much more money than eighteen year old Marie-Antoinette. In vindicating Marie-Antoinette, still falsely perceived as the queen who took lovers and who danced while the people starved, it is necessary to gain a true perspective of her spouse, beyond the archetype of the fat, indolent husband, spoiling a wife he could not satisfy. One must look behind the myths, deliberately propagated and perpetuated in order to sell books and movies about alleged extramarital love affairs, as well as to justify the excesses of the French Revolution. The reality about this tragic royal couple may not be as sensational as some biographies tell it, but it is as exciting, heart-rending and beautiful as any make-believe romance.

Louis XVI is systematically shown as being ugly, obese, smelly, and stupid. By contemporary standards, however, he was considered handsome, with his aquiline nose, deep set blue-grey eyes, and full sensual mouth. As a youth he was tall and thin, the tallest man at Court, and enjoyed intense physical exercise, such as hunting and hammering at his forge (he was a locksmith by hobby.) His physical strength was legendary; he could lift a shovel to shoulder height with a young boy standing on the end of it. Possessing the hardy Bourbon appetite, he developed a paunch as he approached his thirties. He was awkward and shy in his manner although not without dignity in his bearing. The efforts of his detractors to make him unattractive and therefore unlovable serves the purpose of giving his wife an "excuse" for chronic infidelity, another highly-popularized myth. 

Likewise, Louis is presented as being dirty and malodorous. Granted that he was an active man, not a powdered and pampered courtier, and working with metal was not clean work; neither was his daily riding and hunting, as anyone who has ever been around horses will agree. However, he had two tubs of which he made daily use, one for washing and one for rinsing. 

As for his intellect, all one has to do is read anything he wrote to see that Louis XVI was an intelligent man. He could read and speak several foreign languages, knew Latin as well as his native tongue, was a skilled amateur cartographer, enjoyed the tragedies of Shakespeare as well as of the great French dramatists Corneille and Racine. He was fascinated with scientific inventions, which he encouraged, and with geography, outfitting a sea voyage of discovery in the Pacific ocean. He would read his mail as his ministers delivered their reports, without missing a word of what his ministers said. He subscribed to several international newspapers, as a means of keeping informed of events and of the opinions of others.

Louis XVI is always portrayed as politically inept and indifferent, and yet he built up the French navy and army so that Great Britain was defeated in the war for American independence. The ships and soldiers outfitted by King Louis were later used by Napoleon Bonaparte to conquer Europe. During the Revolution, he tried to avoid bloodshed at all costs and would not escape because he did not want to abandon his people to the fanatic minority which had seized power. His calm in the face of the calamities is usually interpreted as phlegmatic indifference, but by remaining composed, he was often able to regain control of situations where the mob was thirsting for blood. 

Louis was a dedicated Roman Catholic, keeping track of his regular Confession and Communion days in his journal. After the French revolutionary government seized control of the Church, he eventually refused to receive Communion from a priest not in union with Rome. He also vetoed the law forcing priests to be deported for not denying the papal supremacy, even though it brought the angry populace upon the palace in June 1792. As Simon Schama points out in his book Citizens, Louis XVI was more and more torn between his duties as father of his people and father of his family. He tried early in the Revolution to try to persuade the queen to escape with their children, but she refused to leave his side, much to her credit.

Since so many books have speculated about the details of Louis' intimate relations with his wife, I did not touch upon it in my novel, wanting to respect the sacred privacy which should exist between spouses. However, because of the misunderstandings which continue to circulate in books, films and articles I have found it necessary to clarify matters on this blog. Let it be made clear that Louis was not impotent, nor did he have any physical defects which would have prevented him from consummating his marriage, according to the court medical records and affirmed by scholars Bernard Faÿ, Vincent Cronin, and Simone Bertière.

Another rehashed error is that Louis XVI was sexually indifferent and refused to consummate his marriage for seven years. In the beginning of the marriage, as I said above, Marie-Antoinette looked as if she were twelve. Louis should be praised for not wanting to rush upon a child. 

Furthermore, Louis belonged to the political clique at Versailles that had been against the Austrian alliance. Austria was the traditional enemy of France, and had leveled a humiliating defeat upon the Bourbons in the Seven Years War. The defeat was blamed upon the mistress of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, who had also been behind arranging the marriage with the Habsburg Archduchess Antonia. Louis' aunt and godmother, the feisty old maid Madame Adélaïde, daughter of Louis XV, never let him forget that his bride was not only an enemy of France, but that she had been brought over by a courtesan, Madame de Pompadour, who also had reddish hair and was named "Antoinette." With visions in his mind of the notorious Pompadour, who had led both his grandfather and his country astray, Louis approached his Austrian bride with caution and reserve. (See Vincent Cronin's Louis and Antoinette.) 

Since his bride was fourteen years old but looked as if she were twelve, I think it speaks well for Louis that he did not wish to deflower a child. According to the letters written by the Queen to her mother the Empress Maria Theresa, the young couple began to attempt to consummate the marriage as early as 1773, when Marie-Antoinette was seventeen and Louis eighteen. Author Simone Bertiere, in her superb biography L'Insoumise, maintains that Marie-Antoinette had a "narrowness of passage" which made consummating the marriage difficult and painful. 

Louis waited for his wife to mature and their first child was born when Antoinette was twenty-two, the first of four, including some miscarriages. Louis XVI was a devoted husband and father, who mingled tears of joy and sorrow with his wife at the births and deaths of their children. Their marriage had problems just like any marriage, but they strove for it to work, and it did work. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were forged into a devoted couple who would be separated only by death.

Sources:

Bertière, Simone. Marie-Antoinette l'insoumise. Paris: Editions de Fallois, 2002.

Cronin, Vincent. Louis and Antoinette. New York: Morrow, 1974

Faÿ, Bernard. Louis XVI ou la fin d'un Monde. Paris: Perrin, 1966.

(Artwork)

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Cash For Havana

 From AND Magazine:

Times are tough in Havana. Trump has cut off Venezuelan oil. The Mexicans have made some reassuring noises, but don’t seem inclined to fill the gap. The Chinese and Russians have no appetite for trying to break an American embargo in the face of U.S. naval forces. So, the Cubans have gone begging. Their friends in America are pushing the equivalent of a GoFundMe page for Communism on our soil.

Trump’s fuel blockade is starving Cuba of power, crippling hospitals and schools, and attempting to induce a famine.

We are rushing solar generators and panels to our neighbors 90 miles away so that hospitals can keep their doors open and their lights on. Your donation helps ensure patients receive the essential care they need.

This crisis does not have to exist. It was created by the Trump Administration and should be reversed immediately.

Until these cruel policies end, as neighbors, we must act and send aid.

Help us stop the Trump Administration from creating famine in Cuba.

Donate now. Send power. Save lives.

People’s Forum

Yes, this is the same People’s Forum run by Neville Roy Singham, the Chinese agent who operates out of Shanghai and bankrolls a wide variety of anti-American groups on U.S. soil. Why he is allowed to continue to do so remains a question only the FBI and DOJ can answer.

The focus on solar panels here is an interesting touch. It pays homage to the climate change narrative that is an accepted mantra in leftist circles, while at the same time nicely ignoring the fact that any money raised will go to the Cubans to spend as they wish. Interestingly, in the instructions for donors is this guidance. “Please do not write ‘Cuba’ in donation comments or on the memo line of checks. Simply write ‘Urgent Aid.’”

Those interested in sending hard copy checks are in fact, simply directed to mail the checks to the People’s Forum in Manhattan.

Most instructive of all, however, is the list of sponsors of this panhandling exercise. They include the usual lost souls, actors Ed Harris, Susan Sarandon, Mark Ruffalo, and Jane Fonda among them, but also a number of radical Marxist organizations dedicated to the destruction of the republic: The 50501 organization, the ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), and the National Network on Cuba. Probably every one of those organizations should have been shut down long ago. (Read more.)

 

Also from AND Magazine:

We wrote recently about the ongoing effort by Marxists in the United States to raise money on behalf of the Communist government in Cuba. That effort continues. Meanwhile, the same folks, in league with a whole raft of other radical leftist groups, are also working on sending a “flotilla” to Havana’s aid. 

A growing coalition of international organizations, including Progressive International, The People’s Forum, CODEPINK, and allied movements across the Americas and beyond is coming together to launch the Nuestra América Flotilla to Cuba in March, 2026, a humanitarian and solidarity mission to the island at a moment of deep crisis.

As U.S. policies continue to suffocate the island’s access to fuel, medicine, and essential goods, we believe this is the moment to act. We are organizing a people-powered mission to break the blockade and deliver aid as well as a powerful message: the people of Cuba are not alone.

The Nuestra América Flotilla will sail toward Cuba, carrying humanitarian aid and representing a united front of organizations committed to peace, sovereignty, and cooperation across borders.

We invite organizations, networks, and individuals committed to international solidarity and humanitarian action to join this historic initiative.

Code Pink – One of the many Marxist organizations inside the United States affiliated with Neville Roy Singham’s CCP-aligned network. (Read more.)

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Our Low Agency Elite

 From Becoming Noble:

There is no shortage of challenges over which conservative elites should be asserting agency: the collapse in birthrates and faith, a disappearance of standards in aesthetics and etiquette, obesity and pornography crises, and the ceding of patronage and control over the high arts to liberals.

The resolution of these challenges can’t just rely on donations to think tanks and political entities to outsource change. It requires mounting powerful, detailed, iterative, personal interventions in their own communities and localities. Subsidiarity is effective.

Conservative elites are usually wealthy precisely because they are high agency. Most are first-generation wealth and have demonstrated entrepreneurialism and determination. But agency can be a far narrower quality than is generally recognized. An individual can be highly agentic within specific domains and completely inert in others.

The most important factor for building and maintaining agency is positive feedback, which reaffirms personal efficacy. From Albert Bandura’s seminal paper ‘Toward a Psychology of Human Agency’:

Among the mechanisms of human agency, none is more central or pervasive than belief of personal efficacy. This core belief is the foundation of human agency.

Belief in one’s efficacy is a key personal resource in personal development and change. It operates through its impact on cognitive, motivational, affective, and decisional processes. Efficacy beliefs affect whether individuals think optimistically or pessimistically, in self-enhancing or self-debilitating ways. Such beliefs affect people’s goals and aspirations, how well they motivate themselves, and their perseverance in the face of difficulties and adversity. Efficacy beliefs also shape people’s outcome expectations—whether they expect their efforts to produce favorable outcomes or adverse ones.…

…efficacy beliefs determine the choices people make at important decisional points. A factor that influences choice behavior can profoundly affect the courses lives take.

One of capitalism’s great strengths is that it has a clear reward function (wealth). The directness of this reward is ideal for fostering agency. The target is clear, the possibility of success is evident, one is encouraged to pursue it, tools are available, and momentum is felt as success builds. Personal efficacy is reified. (Read more.)

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Almsgiving of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette

Louis XVI visits a poor family

During Lent we recall the duties of every Christian to apply themselves more fervently to almsgiving. In pre-revolutionary France it was for the King and the Queen to give an example to everyone else in this regard. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette took this duty seriously and throughout their reign did what they could to help the needy.

At the fireworks celebrating the marriage of the young prince and princess in May 1774, there was a stampede in which many people were killed. Louis and Antoinette gave all of their private spending money for a year to relieve the suffering of the victims and their families. They became very popular with the common people as a result, which was reflected in the adulation with which they were received when the Dauphin took his wife to Paris on her first "official" visit in June 1773. Marie-Antoinette's reputation for sweetness and mercy became even more entrenched in 1774, when as the new Queen she asked that the people be relieved of a tax called "The Queen's belt," customary at the beginning of each reign. "Belts are no longer worn," she said. It was only the onslaught of revolutionary propaganda that would eventually destroy her reputation.

Louis XVI often visited the poor in their homes and villages, distributing alms from his own purse. During the difficult winter of 1776, the King oversaw the distribution of firewood among the peasants. Louis was responsible for many humanitarian reforms. He went incognito to hospitals, prisons, and factories so as to gain first-hand knowledge of the conditions in which the people lived and worked.

The King and Queen were patrons of the Maison Philanthropique, a society founded by Louis XVI which helped the aged, blind and widows. The Queen taught her daughter Madame Royale to wait upon peasant children, to sacrifice her Christmas gifts so as to buy fuel and blankets for the destitute, and to bring baskets of food to the sick. Marie-Antoinette took her children with her on her charitable visits. According to Maxime de la Rocheterie:

Sometimes they went to the Gobelins; and the president of the district coming on one occasion to compliment her, she said, "Monsieur you have many destitute but the moments which we spend in relieving them are very precious to us." Sometimes she went to the free Maternity Society which she had founded, where she had authorized the Sisters to distribute sixteen hundred livres for food and fuel every month and twelve hundred for blankets and clothing, without counting the baby outfits which were given to three hundred mothers. At other times she went to the School of Design also founded by her to which she sent one day twelve hundred livres saved with great effort that the rewards might not be diminished nor the dear scholars suffer through her own distress. Again she placed in the house of Mademoiselle O'Kennedy four daughters of disabled soldiers, orphans, for whom she said, "I made the endowment."

The Queen adopted three poor children to be raised with her own, as well overseeing the upbringing of several needy children, whose education she paid for, while caring for their families. She established a home for unwed mothers, the "Maternity Society," mentioned above. She brought several peasant families to live on her farm at Trianon, building cottages for them. There was food for the hungry distributed every day at Versailles, at the King's command. During the famine of 1787-88, the royal family sold much of their flatware to buy grain for the people, and themselves ate the cheap barley bread in order to be able to give more to the hungry.

Madame de la Tour du Pin, a lady-in-waiting of Marie-Antoinette, recorded in her spirited Memoirs the daily activities at Versailles, including the rumors and the gossip. Her pen does not spare Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, which is why I find the following account to be of interest. Every Sunday, Marie-Antoinette would personally take up a collection for the poor, which the courtiers resented since they preferred to have the money on hand for gambling. The queen supported several impoverished families from her own purse. As Madame de la Tour du Pin describes:

We had to be there before seven, for the Queen entered before the chiming of the clock. Beside her door would be one of the two Curés of Versailles. He would hand her a purse and she would go around to everyone, taking up a collection and saying: "For the poor, if you please." Each lady had her 'écu' of six francs ready in her hand and the men had their 'louis.' The Curé would follow the Queen as she collected this small tax for her poor people, a levy which often totaled as much as much as one hundred 'louis' and never less than fifty. I often heard some of the younger people, including the most spendthrift, complaining inordinately of this almsgiving being forced upon them, yet they would not have thought twice of hazarding a sum one hundred times as large in a game of chance, a sum much larger than that levied by the Queen. (Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin: Laughing and Dancing Our Way to the Precipice, p. 74)

Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette contributed a great deal throughout their reign to the care of orphans and foundlings. They patronized foundling hospitals, which the Queen often visited with her children. Above is a picture of an occasion in February, 1790, after their removal to Paris, when the king, the queen and their children toured such a facility, where the nuns cared for abandoned babies and little children. As is reported by Maxime de la Rocheterie, the young Dauphin, soon to be an orphan himself, was particularly drawn to the foundlings and gave all of his small savings to aid them.

The king and queen did not see helping the poor as anything extraordinary, but as a basic Christian duty. The royal couple's almsgiving stopped only with their incarceration in the Temple in August 1792, for then they had nothing left to give but their lives.

(Sources: Memoirs of Madame de la Tour du Pin, Marguerite Jallut's and Philippe Huisman's Marie-Antoinette, Vincent Cronin's Louis and Antoinette, Antonia Fraser's The Journey, Madame Campan's Memoirs, Mémoires de madame la Duchesse de Tourzel, Maxime de la Rocheterie's The Life of Marie-Antoinette)

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What Lies Beneath the Epstein Scandals

 From TFP:

The Epstein scandal is only possible because a corrupt liberal culture already contains so much of the depravity found in the files. It is mainstream and permeates many sectors. Films and media portray and celebrate immoral relationships everywhere. Fashion and pop culture depict and even glorify the most depraved behaviors. Memes and social media stretch the limits of decency with shock content that breaks all the rules. The general public shows an appetite for the lurid details of these scandals that suggest an implicit complicity with such lewdness.

When the Epstein iceberg appeared on the horizon, the ground was prepared. People are drawn to these revelations that promote all that is irrational, corrupt and impure. The tip of an iceberg presupposes a vast ice mass beneath the freezing surface. Thus, the high-profile debauchery that fills the headlines presupposes a sinister underworld drawing from all levels of society, corrupting society as a whole. Local networks of iniquity must also exist parallel to those of Epstein. These networks must have their Epstein-like figures that facilitate the spread of vice and lewdness. They have their dark secrets. The only difference is that their characters remain hidden.

Indeed, many have tried to frame the Epstein debate as a class struggle between corrupt elites versus the uncorrupt common people. However, the truth is that the whole of society is rotten and involved in the general decadence. Any return to order must involve a general moral regeneration. (Read more.)

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Courtship Rituals

 From Ross Arlen Tieken:

One of the great generators of loneliness in my immediate circle of students is the lack of careful, public, and social courtship rituals. Even the most well-meaning of junior high boys, even if charged with virtue and self-discipline, is mostly unable to control himself alone with a girl, or prevent themselves from grotesque and inept pawing in an environment that simply accepts public displays of erotically-charged affection from pubescent young people.

Besides being revolting, the young lovers tend to go too far too quickly, and having achieved the cheap imitation of intimacy, they find themselves rightly disappointed and hurt, and yet longing desperately for more. Bitterness colors their experience, and love, eros, longing, and the opposite sex are cast in their eyes as a tragedy, an insupportable burden. The option then is overindulgence or cynicism.

This is not their fault obviously. When our children suddenly bloom into adulthood, they are meant to be given proper forms which establish the appropriate behavior for courtship. At 13, you talk with them (not on the phone, not over text, not over Snapchat… ever). At 14, you may talk and walk with them. At 15, you may spend time together in the company of family and friends. At 16, you may go on a chaperoned date and a dance. Etc.

Instead of this careful circling of each other, which allows genuine regard and understanding to grow, increases respect for boundaries and personhood, preserves the mystery of the body, socially establishes a couple, and beautifies the story of love, we simply toss teens in the back of the bus with a bluetooth speaker, give them an anonymous line of visual communication, and hope that our teaching will preserve their innocence. (Read more.)

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