The Nutcracker

 

 In the hundred years or so since its debut, Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker has become a delightful aspect of modern Christmas celebrations. Composed during the "Silver Age" of Russian ballet, The Nutcracker is based upon a fairy tale by the German romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffman, whose stories also inspired Delibes' Coppelia and Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman. It is one of the few ballets that is not a love story, although later stagings have tried to make it into one. The music, however, is powerful enough for any story of a great romance. In college, I helped my sister Andrea, who was still in high school, with a project; we were listening to the "Pas de Deux" of the Sugar Plum Fairy and her cavalier. Andrea said, "That must be from a really great love story." "No, it's just from The Nutcracker," I replied. It is a simple story, full of childhood's innocent, but very real, hopes and fears. To watch or listen to The Nutcracker is to enter into a dream, a dream which comes to life even after so many years, and all wars and revolutions which have tormented the world.

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Codifying America's Defense

 From Tierney's Real News:

The Senate passed a $900 BILLION defense policy bill by a 77–20 vote, codifying much of President Trump’s security agenda and implementing the largest military acquisition overhaul in decades. The bill funds new submarines, fighter jets, munitions and drones and codifies 15 Trump EOs on military reform, border security, and DEI elimination.

It provides a 3.8% pay raise for military personnel—the largest in years—along with quality-of-life improvements such as better housing and expanded family support, directly benefiting active-duty troops and their families.

President Trump also announced a one-time $1,776 "warrior dividend" payment to eligible U.S. military personnel (E-1 to O-6 and certain reserves) as a holiday bonus which was already funded. The payment honors 1776 and targets about 1.45 million service members on active duty as of November 30, 2025, and will be disbursed by late December.

The defense bill streamlines weapons procurement to deliver submarines, fighter jets, drones, and munitions faster and more cost-effectively, enhancing readiness against threats like China while saving taxpayer dollars by cutting “red tape.”

“The bill sets us on a path to modernize our defense capabilities and expand our drone manufacturing, shipbuilding efforts, and the development of innovative low-cost weapons,” to compete with Russia and Communist China. (Read more.)

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Aristocracy

 From Paul Gottfried at Chronicles:

This timely anthology, focused on what could be called the aristocratic wing of the “conservative tradition,” chooses some unconventional thinkers, not all of whom would be recognizable to serious historians as conservatives. One might question whether Friedrich Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler, and Julius Evola should count as traditional conservatives. But the authors of the essays on Nietzsche, Evola, and Spengler (Michael Harding and Grant Havers) argue they are relevant to conservative thought because they were all devastatingly critical of the modern notion of equality and stressed the value of aristocracies.

Although historical conservatism as a body of thought and political practice emerged from the French Revolution, there is also an American tradition of criticizing democratic equality and defending traditional social elites that represents what Russell Kirk called “the conservative mind.” Irving Babbitt, Henry Adams, and Robert Nisbet, who are all deservedly treated in this anthology, stood for this peculiarly American kind of conservatism, one that outside of our surviving conservative traditionalists barely exists anymore.

Alexander-Davey explores “aristocratic liberal” thought in his essay on the 19th-century German novelist and political theorist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl (1823-1897), who was a moderate European conservative during what might be described as the silver age of European conservatism. (The golden age occurred during the European restoration following the Napoleonic Wars.) Alexander-Davey treats both Riehl and his Russian near-contemporary Konstantin Leontiev as “prophets of anti-modernity.” (Read more.)

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Mistletoe

Here is some historical background on the pagan plant which has long been pleasantly associated with Christmas.

Many folks know that the berries and leaves are toxic, but less known, I suspect, is that the shrub grows high in the branches of trees. Where does it put its roots? They wander under the skin of its host, supping from the tree's veins. One or two mistletoe bushes in an otherwise healthy tree will deplete it, though not to the point of death. Look hard in the canopy of maples and oaks: That squirrel's nest, if green, may be a mature mistletoe working its macabre magic.

This sinister trait has resonated in cultures through the ages. In Greek mythology, Persephone unlocked the gates to the underworld with a wand of mistletoe. The ancient druids venerated mistletoe for its powers and held that when the plant was growing on oak trees, as opposed to apple, it was particularly sacred. The tradition of kissing beneath it, based loosely on Celtic lore, became popular in the 19th century along with other yuletide rituals. (Read more.)

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Do You See it?

From Tierney's Real News:

What if every morning you sent your daughter off to elementary school and every evening she came home and told you about the scene that happened that day at school.

The first day it was someone acting up in her class that took the attention off study.

The second day it was someone acting up outside her classroom window that distracted the class.

The third day it was someone in the hallway acting up that prevented the students ever from entering class that day at all.

The fourth day it was someone acting up in the lunch room that prevented class from ever returning to class again that day.

The fifth day it was a group fighting at the entrance to the school that prevented anyone from entering or leaving the building.

The sixth day it was a called-in “bomb threat” at recess and the school and grounds had to be evacuated.

The seventh day - there was a school shooting during gym (even though the building was a gun-free zone) and one classmate was killed but nobody knows who did it because the killer was wearing a mask and the principal disabled the school cameras in the gym to “protect” the privacy of the students.

And on and on and on. Every week brought new threats or some unseen catastrophe. It felt as though the school and the world teetered on the edge of disaster, never allowing a moment’s peace or certainty.

By the end of her first year of school your daughter had learned NOTHING and did not know how to read or write or do arithmetic.

But she HAD learned how to be afraid and seek comfort by any means possible. She was exhausted. She wanted someone to protect her and take her away from all that - while at the same time she became so used to the excitement that life seemed dull without it. (Read more.)

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Defense of the Traditional Date of Christmas

From Dr. Taylor Marshall:

Now we move on to establishing the birthday of Christ from Sacred Scripture in two steps. The first step is to use Scripture to determine the birthday of Saint John the Baptist. The next step is using Saint John the Baptist’s birthday as the key for finding Christ’s birthday. We can discover that Christ was born in late December by observing first the time of year in which Saint Luke describes Saint Zacharias in the temple. This provides us with the approximate conception date of Saint John the Baptist. From there we can follow the chronology that Saint Luke gives, and that lands us at the end of December. 

Saint Luke reports that Zacharias served in the “course of Abias” (Lk 1:5) which Scripture records as the eighth course among the twenty-four priestly courses (Neh 12:17). Each shift of priests served one week in the temple for two times each year. The course of Abias served during the eighth week and the thirty-second week in the annual cycle.[ii]However, when did the cycle of courses begin?

Josef Heinrich Friedlieb has convincingly established that the first priestly course of Jojarib was on duty during the destruction of Jerusalem on the ninth day of the Jewish month of Av.[iii]Thus the priestly course of Jojarib was on duty during the second week of Av. Consequently, the priestly course of Abias (the course of Saint Zacharias) was undoubtedly serving during the second week of the Jewish month of Tishri—the very week of the Day of Atonement on the tenth day of Tishri. In our calendar, the Day of Atonement would land anywhere from September 22 to October 8.

Zacharias and Elizabeth conceived John the Baptist immediately after Zacharias served his course. This entails that Saint John the Baptist would have been conceived somewhere around the end of September, placing John’s birth at the end of June, confirming the Catholic Church’s celebration of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on June 24.

The second-century Protoevangelium of Saint James also confirms a late September conception of the Baptist since the work depicts Saint Zacharias as High Priest and as entering the Holy of Holies—not merely the holy place with the altar of incense. This is a factual mistake because Zacharias was not the high priest, but one of the chief priests.[iv]Still, the Protoevangelium regards Zacharias as a high priest and this associates him with the Day of Atonement, which lands on the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishri (roughly the end of our September). Immediately after this entry into the temple and message of the Archangel Gabriel, Zacharias and Elizabeth conceive John the Baptist. Allowing for forty weeks of gestation, this places the birth of John the Baptist at the end of June—once again confirming the Catholic date for the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist on June 24.

The rest of the dating is rather simple. We read that just after the Immaculate Virgin Mary conceived Christ, she went to visit her cousin Elizabeth who was six months pregnant with John the Baptist. This means that John the Baptist was six months older that our Lord Jesus Christ (Lk 1:24-27, 36). If you add six months to June 24 you get December 24-25 as the birthday of Christ. Then, if you subtract nine months from December 25 you get that the Annunciation was March 25. All the dates match up perfectly. So then, if John the Baptist was conceived shortly after the Jewish Day of the Atonement, then the traditional Catholic dates are essentially correct. The birth of Christ would be about or on December 25.

Sacred Tradition also confirms December 25 as the birthday of the Son of God. The source of this ancient tradition is the Blessed Virgin Mary herself. Ask any mother about the birth of her children. She will not only give you the date of the birth, but she will be able to rattle off the time, the location, the weather, the weight of the baby, the length of the baby, and a number of other details. I’m the father of six blessed children, and while I sometimes forget these details—mea maxima culpa—my wife never does. You see, mothers never forget the details surrounding the births of their babies. (Read more.)

 

More HERE.

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"The Holly and the Ivy"

The holly and the ivy, when they are both full grown,
Of all the trees that are in the wood, the holly bears the crown.

Refrain:

Oh, the rising of the sun and the running of the deer,

The playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir.

The holly bears a blossom as white as lily flower,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to be our sweet saviour

Refrain

The holly bears a berry as red as any blood,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ to do poor sinners good.

Refrain

The holly bears a prickle as sharp as any thorn,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ on Christmas Day in the morn.

Refrain

The holly bears a bark as bitter as any gall,

And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ for to redeem us all.

Refrain

It is an old English carol, the original of which was a song about the complexity of male and female relationships. David Beaulieu of About.com explains:

So where does the ivy come into play in the song, "The Holly and the Ivy?" Except for its appearance alongside holly in the opening stanza, it isn't even mentioned in the song. If this one, insignificant reference to ivy were struck from the lyrics, in what way would the song suffer? And if your answer is, "Not at all," then the next logical question to ask is: Why is the carol not titled simply, "The Holly," instead of, "The Holly and the Ivy?"

....The answer may lie in the fact that "The Holly and the Ivy" is based on older songs, such as "The Contest of the Holly and the Ivy" ....

In "The Contest of the Holly and the Ivy," ivy plays a role equally important to that of holly. The mention of ivy in the first stanza (and the last stanza, which merely repeats the first) in "The Holly and the Ivy" is therefore a hold-over, a remnant from an earlier era, a fragment pointing to music with a very different meaning. The influence of the earlier songs about the holly and the ivy was apparently so strong that the ivy was given a cameo appearance in this one, too -- despite the fact that only the holly has any major role to play in it.

What we see played out in "The Contest of the Holly and the Ivy" and similar songs (perhaps dating back to medieval times) is the rivalry between men and women, thinly disguised as a contest between the holly and ivy. Holly was conceived of as being masculine in the plant symbology of the time, probably because it is more rigid and prickly; while the softer ivy is associated with the feminine in this tradition.

According to an article at Dave's Garden:

Using ivy as decoration also dates back to the time of the Romans, who associated it with Bacchus (the Roman equivalent of the Greek Dionysus, god of wine and intoxication). Ivy was a symbol of fidelity and marriage, and was often wound into a crown, wreath or garland.^[3] It also served as a symbol of prosperity and charity, and thus it was adopted by the early Christians, for whom it was a reminder to help the less fortunate. In early England, it was considered bad luck to use ivy alone in decorating for Christmas, and would give the woman of the house the upper hand.

The same site explains the symbolism of holly:

The practice of ornamenting the home with holly began with the Romans, who regarded it as an omen of good fortune and a symbol of immortality. They sent congratulatory wreaths of holly to newlyweds, and also used it as a gift during the festival of Saturnalia (a celebration which itself is based partly on Greek and Egyptian solstice observances). As early Christians adopted the practice of decorating with the plant, holly took on religious associations--namely, that the spiky leaves represented Christ’s crown of thorns, and the red berries his blood....

The Christmas carol “The Holly and The Ivy” is an example of how ancient beliefs were absorbed by the Christian church. The song we sing today was recorded by a folk song collector named Cecil Sharp, who heard it sung in Chipping Camden, Gloucestershire, in 1909:^[5]

The holly and the ivy,
When both are full well grown.
Of all the trees that are in the wood,
The holly bears the crown.

Oh, the rising of the sun,
The running of the deer.
The playing of the merry organ,
Sweet singing in the choir.

Subsequent verses transform the carol into a Christian song. Dr. Ian Bradley, of the St. Andrews University School of Divinity in Scotland, writes that the although the lyrics focus on the holly as a symbol of Christ, ivy is also mentioned because of the carol’s basis on an older medieval song in which the plants personify men and women. In the earlier song, holly and ivy were equals, with holly representing goodness and masculinity; ivy standing for evil (or at least weakness) and femininity.^[6]

To the medieval mind, the male was considered the dominant sex, and a support for the weaker and more delicate female, thus the rigid holly shrub and the twining ivy vine must have seemed like natural embodiments of those traits. The original meaning of “The Holly and the Ivy” is a reminder that there has always been a subtle and humorous (sometimes not so subtle and humorous) competition between men and women for dominance. These two tough plants may represent the struggle between the sexes, but they can also be seen as a celebration of male and female cooperation and interdependence. (Read more.)

(Artwork from Karen) Share

Systemic Discrimination Against White Men

 From Amuse on X:

Once you notice the pipeline logic, certain anecdotes stop looking like isolated incidents. A television writers’ room cannot be “all white male,” so a white male applicant is rejected even when praised. A newsroom has dozens of qualified applicants, but internal talk treats hiring another white man as “backsliding” on representation. A faculty committee looks at a finalist who is strongest on paper, and then treats that strength as something to be outweighed by the imperative not to “go with the man again.” These stories are not difficult to find, but they are usually told in a whisper, because the one thing the system cannot tolerate is open description.

You might respond, anecdotes are not evidence. Fair enough. But the broader pattern is visible in who occupies the junior ranks of the professions that shape public life. In media, major organizations after 2020 publicly announced aggressive diversity targets, then reorganized internships and fellowships accordingly. In entertainment, guild and studio metrics increasingly treated “representation” as a principal constraint, not a side consideration. In academia, DEI statements became a screening mechanism, and cluster hiring and diversity focused fellowships became a parallel hiring track. In corporate America, managers were asked to move numbers, often with explicit or implicit penalties for failing to do so.

Now comes the morally loaded question. Is a decline in young white male representation necessarily discrimination? Not logically. There are many possible explanations, including preference changes, educational shifts, and the large, welcome entry of women into professions historically closed to them. But the steelman case is that at least some meaningful part of the decline is not explained by neutral forces. It is explained by deliberate de prioritization of white men as a group, either explicitly or through proxy mechanisms that achieve the same result while preserving plausible deniability. (Read more.)

 

 From Compact Magazine:

For a decade, it kept going, faster and faster. Without any actual quotas to achieve—only the constant exhortation to “do better”—the diversity complex became self-radicalizing, a strange confluence of top-down and bottom-up pressure. No one ever said what the right number of white men would be, but it was always fewer than you currently had. 

The boundaries shifted depending on the industry and the moment: A white woman might be favored in some contexts, disfavored in others; an Asian-American man might face extra obstacles in tech or medicine, but if he wanted to be a screenwriter or an English professor, the system worked in his favor. But for younger white men, any professional success was fundamentally a problem for institutions to solve. 

And solve it they did.

Over the course of the 2010s, nearly every mechanism liberal America used to confer prestige was reweighted along identitarian lines. Seven white male Gen Xers won the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2013 alone—the same as the total number of white male millennials who’ve won since. 

In 2014, two white male millennials were National Book Award finalists, including one winner; that year nine white male American artists under 40 appeared at the Whitney Biennial. But of the 70 millennial writers nominated for National Book Awards in the decade that followed, just three were white men. The “Big 4” galleries represent 47 millennial artists; just three are white men. At the 2024 Whitney Biennial, which featured 45 millennial artists, zero were white American men.

The white men shut out of the culture industries didn’t surge into other high-status fields. They didn’t suddenly flood advertising, law, or medicine, which are all less white and significantly less male than they were a decade ago. White men dropped from 31.2 percent of law school matriculants in 2016 to 25.7 percent in 2024. (Read more.)

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Burke’s Revolutionary Reflection

 From The New Criterion:

When did Burke become the Burke that Russell Kirk recognized as the “first conservative of our time of troubles”? Historians agree that this image sharpened after the French Revolution. In this telling, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) led to Burke’s falling out with the radical Whig Charles James Fox, and then, in 1791, to a split between Old Whigs (Burkean, proto-conservative) and New (Foxite, pro-radical). British Nineteenth-century liberalism and conservatism descend from this division. Both were chastened by the French Revolution, the Terror, and the Napoleonic Wars. Like almost all Europeans, British liberals and conservatives were skeptical about the American experiment’s prospects. English radicalism was suppressed by William Pitt the Younger in the Napoleonic emergency, and though it resurfaced after 1815, it never regained its momentum.

I suggest that Burke’s recoil from the implications of radical Whiggery began earlier, during the American Revolution. Its pivotal episode was not the mob breaking into the Tuileries Palace in 1790 and chasing Marie Antoinette from her bed. It was the events that Herbert Butterfield called “the revolution we escaped”: the Gordon Riots of June 1780. They remain the biggest riots in British history. The Whig split of 1791 over the French Revolution was also preceded by a Whig split in 1782, as Lord  North’s government collapsed amid defeat in America. The reaction against English radicalism began in 1780, then accelerated after 1789.

Burke began writing the Reflections in late 1789, after the fall of the Bastille. He resumed work in early 1790, after reading A Discourse on the Love of Our Country. The Discourse transcribed a speech that Richard Price, a Dissenting minister and radical Whig, had delivered to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain at the meeting house in Old Jewry, by the Bank of England. In his 1776 pamphlet Civil Liberty, Price had justified the American Revolution as the heir to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and also as a millenarian portent. He now made the same argument about the French Revolution. The sack of the Tuileries, which inspired Burke’s chivalric effusions, happened six months later, in October 1790. The Reflections were published in November. (Read more.)

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