How Parents’ Personalities Shape Children’s Lives

 From Neuroscience:

A new analysis led by Joshua Jackson, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, explores how parents’ personalities—boisterous or reserved, agreeable or cranky, concerned or care-free—can shape the lives of their children, for better or worse.

The study involved nearly 9,400 kids aged 11-17 and their parents who participated in a German survey that has been running since 1984. Researchers considered the so-called “big five” traits psychologists use to describe personality in broad strokes: Extroversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness and neuroticism.

The survey also included measures of the kids’ lives, including their overall health, grades in school, use of alcohol or cigarettes, the amount of time spent on leisure activities—beyond watching TV or surfing the Internet—and the frequency of family arguments. The study, co-authored with graduate student Amanda Wright, was published recently in Infant and Child Development. Below, Jackson explained the findings and the impact a parent’s personality can have on their kids. (Read more.)

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The Realistic Impressionism of John Singer Sargent

 From Colossal:

A new video from Evan Puschak, the creator behind the Nerdwriter YouTube channel, delves into the uniquely blended style of the American painter John Singer Sargent (1856-1925). Described by Kottke as “realism through impressionism,” Sargent’s approach centers on accurately capturing the tonal value of a scene, the spectrum of light to dark, rather than on faithful depictions of objects, figures, or shapes. “Everywhere you look,” Puschak says, “you see his supremely confident looseness, a kind of painting you maybe wouldn’t think to associate with a realistic representation of the world. And yet that’s exactly the final effect—a realism that is somehow more true than finely detailed painting.” Watch the short art history lesson above to learn more about Sargent’s training, work, and process and how “the impressions of light and color were his subjects.” (Read more.)

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Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom

 From Brownstone Institute:

The CCP has held to the command-and-control model ever since, with variable results. In 1958, Mao launched a forced march towards development known as the Great Leap Forward. This is estimated to have led to 30 million people dying of starvation as the population forfeited much of their actual real-world produce to the state, based on fictional production figures and targets. In 1966, Mao had another genius idea, launching the Cultural Revolution, which caused another two million deaths, and turned the population and family members against each other.

Mao did not invent the hundred flowers maxim, which (according to that infallible authority ChatGPT) dates back to the philosopher Xunxi and the Warring States Period in which many competing schools of thought emerged, including Taoism and Confucianism. 

The hundred flowers dictum is both an eloquent expression of the liberal ideal, and (in the case of Mao) a stark warning of the consequences of abandoning it. Allowing ‘the authorities’ unchecked power to impose their will on a country and relieving them from any pressure to consider alternative options is likely to lead to disaster. This is true of all autocratic regimes; it is not just a left-wing phenomenon. One fascist leader, Hitler, made the decisions that precipitated the Second World War, which led to total deaths estimated to range between 70 and 85 million people.

Autocratic leaders led the world over the cliff in the 20th century. But this could not happen in a functioning democracy, could it? 

The extent to which democratic governments follow the will of the people is debatable, but their advantage over autocratic governments should be their superior self-correcting capability. If government policies turn out badly, alternative governments are ready to discredit them to win power themselves, until they in turn fall out of favor with the public and are replaced. If a government will not make a U-turn, replace it with another government that will.

Unfortunately, this self-correcting capability has not been very evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Why not? (Read more.)

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The Fall of the Praetorian Guard

 From Heritage Daily:

The roots of the guard can be found during the Roman Republic, when soldiers served as protectors for Roman generals and important figures, or as elite guards for military praetors. High-ranked generals with imperium held public office by serving as a magistrate or promagistrate. They were assigned a civil servant, lictors, to serve as an attendant and bodyguard. Where no personal bodyguard was assigned, senior field officers safeguarded themselves with temporary bodyguard units of selected soldiers.

Around 40 BC, Octavian, who would later become Emperor Caesar Augustus, installed praetorians within the pomerium (a religious boundary around the city of Rome), the first example of troops being permanently garrisoned in Rome proper. Members of the guard accompanied Augustus on active campaigns, protecting the civic administrations and rule of law. At camp, the cohors praetoria (a cohort of praetorians guarding the commander), were posted near the praetorium, the tent of the commander, which the guard is believed to be named after.

After the construction of Rome’s Praetorian camp known as the Castra Praetoria around 23 BC, their role extended to escorting the emperor and the members of the imperial family, and to serve as a policing force during times of riot. According to the Roman historian and politician, Tacitus, the guard around this time numbered nine Praetorian cohorts (4500 men, the equivalent of a legion), however, an inscription from near the end of Augustus’s rule suggests that their numbers were briefly increased to twelve. (Read more.)

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China and the Bidens

 From Trending Politics:

China sent a warning to Joe Biden on Tuesday after the Chinese-American bank, Cathay Bank, provided Senate Republicans with records revealing millions of dollars transferred from Chinese firms to Hunter Biden and James Biden.

“In my mind, it’s the Chinese government telling Joe Biden, ‘We got the goods on you, buddy, and we’re willing to dish it up,’” Sen. Johnson told The Washington Times.

The Washington Times reported:

The records show deep financial ties between the president’s son and brother and the now-defunct CEFC China Energy, which had ties to the Chinese Communist Party. The energy giant wired $1 million to Hudson West III, a joint venture owned by Hunter Biden and Gongwen Dong, a business associate of CEFC’s founder and chairman, Ye Jianming.

A second Chinese energy company, Northern International Capital Holdings, which is associated with the communist-backed CEFC, wired $5 million to Hudson West III, the Cathay Bank records show. The money sent from the two companies funded a $4.8 million wire transfer from Hudson West III to Hunter Biden’s companies Owasco P.C. and Owasco LLC, and Lion Hall Group, owned by the president’s brother James Biden.

(Read more.)

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Modesty Myths

 From Christine Niles: "Well-intentioned Catholics who desire to restore modesty to dress are unwittingly pushing well-worn myths."

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A Sèvres Vase with the Dauphine Marie-Antoinette

 Via Le Boudoir.

What the Meissen manufactory is in Germany, the venerable "Manufacture royale de porcelaine de Sèvres" - Sévres for short - is in France. The lady on this richly painted vase with the high forehead typical of the Rococo period is none other than the youthful Queen Marie Antoinette. This piece was created at the beginning of her regency between 1770 and 1774 and was intended as a diplomatic gift - as a pair with Marie Antoinette's husband Louis XVI. Only six of these pairs of vases have survived worldwide, one of which is in the Hetjens Museum. On the one hand, these vases were intended to bear witness to the beauty of the young queen, and on the other hand, to represent the wealth of her husband. A total of three painters were involved in these "vases with ears", one for the portrait, one for the flowers and one for the gold painting. Luck did not bring the daughter of the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa the splendor of these rococo vases: she was executed by guillotine in the turmoil of the French Revolution in 1793, a few months after her husband.

More HERE.

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The Point of No Return

 From American Greatness:

While we cannot know for certain whether New York County, New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s catastrophic decision to successfully indict and arraign a former president of the United States was partially attributable to an intervening apparition, we can reasonably conclude that the actions of this past week have cast a most woeful die for the trajectory of our decadent, declining republic. The 34-count formal indictment of former President Donald Trump, laughably meritless on the legal merits and scandalously imprudent on the broader political judgment, represents a genie that cannot, and will not, ever be returned to its bottle.

Much ink already has been spilled on the glaring legal deficiencies in Bragg’s case, which ought to be evident to any competent first-year law student and which had led Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance Jr., U.S. prosecutors and—in the not-so-distant past—Bragg himself to eschew prosecution. The underlying New York state crime that Trump allegedly violated and which is the exclusive crime invoked in the formal indictment, falsifying business records in the first degree, has a two-year statute of limitations under New York criminal law. The final alleged criminal bookkeeping action—a “hush money” payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels by former Trump “fixer,” and more recent convicted felon, Michael Cohen—was on December 5, 2017. The statute of limitations thus tolled over three years ago. That alone should suffice to dismiss the case.

Bragg’s theory appears to be that he can somehow evade this, and simultaneously enhance the misdemeanor to a felony, by proving—beyond a reasonable doubt, naturally—that Trump’s bookkeeping falsifications were done in furtherance of another crime. But Bragg, remarkably, has not said what that crime is. It appears to be some amorphous combination of skirting federal campaign law and/or New York state election law, in the context of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential run; but the former has a five-year statute of limitations (thus also tolled) and is also well outside Bragg’s legitimate prosecutorial jurisdiction as a county district attorney, and the latter should not properly apply to a U.S. presidential candidate. Moreover, even ignoring the dispositive statute of limitations and jurisdictional issues, the very thing Bragg would need to prove to a jury “beyond a reasonable doubt” to secure the felony enhancement—that Trump directed Cohen to make the payments with the specific intent to benefit his 2016 presidential campaign—is rebutted by Cohen himself, who has testified under oath that Trump requested the payments to be made furtively to spare his family personal embarrassment.

Alvin Bragg, lest it go unstated, is the same George Soros-funded “reform prosecutor” who has overseen a 22 percent year-over-year increase in New York City’s crime rate, even as he has downgraded a whopping 52 percent of felonies to misdemeanors. In the Big Apple, homicides are spiking, illegal guns are everywhere, single women are afraid to walk the streets of Manhattan alone, and commuters are terrified to ride the subway lest insane homeless persons push them into oncoming trains. Yet this is how Alvin Bragg, who, along with New York State Attorney General Letitia James, ran on an open and explicit “Get Trump” campaign platform, chooses to spend his time, expend his prosecutorial resources and seek misdemeanor-to-felony enhancements.

But the deed is done. If not dismissed beforehand, a trial would likely not unfold until later this year or early next. And in the interim, other ambitious prosecutors investigating Trump in Georgia and Washington, D.C., have now watched Bragg shatter the hitherto unbroken precedent of the ruling political party never criminally indicting a former and defeated president of the opposite political party, which had been—until this past week—one of the few remaining things to which we might point to distinguish our late-stage republic from its third-world banana republic equivalents the world over. Perhaps additional indictments in those jurisdictions will indeed follow. Either way, the political ramifications for the 2024 Republican presidential primary are legion. (Read more.)

 

Trump's indictment has destroyed the presumption of innocence, HERE.

 

From Conservative Brief:

A roughly two-year-old video of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has resurfaced, raising questions about prior comments he made regarding former President Donald Trump. During a January 2021 radio interview with Ebro Darden on HOT 97, which took place when he was running in the election to be the Manhattan district attorney, Bragg boasts about helping “sue the Trump administration over 100 times,” said “rich old white men” need to be prosecuted, and said he had “seen the lawlessness than he [Trump] can do.” (Read more.)

From The Federalist:

In early to mid-February of 2021, Bragg’s predecessor, District Attorney Cyrus Vance, arranged for private criminal defense attorney and former federal prosecutor Mark Pomerantz to be a special assistant district attorney for the Manhattan D.A.’s office. Pomerantz, whom The New York Times noted was to work “solely on the Trump investigation,” took a temporary leave of absence from his law firm, Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, where he had defended former Sen. Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., against alleged campaign finance violations. But even before being sworn in as a special assistant to the Manhattan D.A., Pomerantz had reportedly “been helping with the case informally for months…”  

According to the Times, “the hiring of an outsider is a highly unusual move for a prosecutor’s office.” One must wonder, then, how much more unusual it is for the Manhattan D.A.’s office to receive the “informal” assistance of a private criminal defense attorney. The legacy news outlet, however, justified the hiring of Pomerantz based on the “usual complexity” of “the two-and-a-half-year investigation of the former president and his family business.” A few months later, the D.A.’s office welcomed two more outsiders, Elyssa Abuhoff and Caroline Williamson, who also both took leaves of absence from the New York powerhouse Paul, Weiss to work on the Trump investigation as special assistant district attorney. For a law firm to lend not one but three lawyers to the Manhattan D.A.’s office seems rather magnanimous, until you consider Paul, Weiss’s previous generosity to Joe Biden. During Biden’s White House run, the law firm hosted a $2,800-per-plate fundraiser for about 100 guests. (Read more.)

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The Spiritual Death of the West

 I loved Raspail's novel Sire which I bought in Lourdes in 1994. From First Things:

The most important dystopian novels of the first half of the twentieth century are Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. Huxley and Orwell captured the two sides of modern despotism, one soft and seductive, the other hard and punitive. The most important dystopian novel of the second half of the century is Jean Raspail’s Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints, 1973). Its central plotline concerns an armada that transports one million migrants from India to the shores of France. It’s an invasion, an occupation of the Global North by the Global South. As the migrants land, France is thrown into chaos, along with the rest of Europe, and Western civilization dies.

Yet The Camp of the Saints is not a disaster novel. The book’s significance does not hinge on whether Raspail was correct to predict mass immigration or describe it in catastrophic terms. Rather, the novel’s genius lies in the depiction of an apocalypse in the original sense of that term. Properly translated, apocalypse is rendered as revelation, disclosure, literally an “uncovering.” The Camp of the Saints unveils the perverse logic that pervades late Western civilization, and throws into sharp relief the nihilism of guilt whereby the West welcomes its own destruction.

The Camp of the Saints was one of Raspail’s first novels, and he went on to have a distinguished literary career. His best books are an unusual kind of historical fiction, encompassing counterfactuals and tales of the sudden resurfacing of long-lost dynasties or extinct peoples. In some works, Raspail expressed what might be called a literary royalism. He imagined a quasi-fictional kingdom, Patagonia, as a transcendent poetic refuge from the prosaisms of modern politics. This outlook earned him many admirers in traditionalist Catholic circles.

A Catholic himself, Raspail sympathized with Catholic traditionalism. Before he died in 2020, he had become a vocal defender of the Tridentine Mass. At the same time, he maintained friendly relations with people across the political spectrum. He corresponded with liberal and left-wing intellectuals, as well as some socialist politicians, including President François Mitterrand and Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. In 2000, Raspail was nearly admitted into the Académie Française but lost a close vote. In 2003, he received the Grand prix de littérature de l’Académie française, a prize for lifetime achievement.

Unlike Huxley and Orwell, Raspail lacks international name recognition. He possesses his little fame, especially in the ­United States, more as a presumptive racist than as an accomplished writer. A 2019 New York Times article called The Camp of the Saints “a must-read within white supremacist circles.” The publishing house that owns the rights to the English translation has suppressed the book, making it almost impossible to find. (Read more.)

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