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From
Inside Chic:
Georgia O’Keeffe has long been one of our favorite artists, and
her work is undergoing a major reconsideration. This year, the Tate
Modern, in London, is holding Britain’s largest retrospective of her work ever,
placing her squarely in the pantheon of the 20th Century’s most
important painters. Dawn Tripp recently published a fascinating and
highly readable novel, Georgia,
about O’Keeffe’s formative years as an artist in New York. We had a
chance to interview Dawn, who gave us a captivating insight into why
Georgia not only still resonates, but feels more important than ever. (Read more.)
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From
Crisis:
Appalled by the corruption and political violence under Batista’s
regime, many members of Cuba’s middle class and intelligentsia supported
Castro’s Revolution (during which his relationship to communism was
still ambiguous). However, they were quickly disappointed with what came
next. In the fifty-seven years that the Castro brothers have ruled
Cuba, the country has become a laboratory of communist terror: the killings and disappearances of thousands of Cubans
have been documented; there are no free elections; the quality of life
in Cuba has deteriorated rapidly, and many Cubans live in abject
poverty; and the abortion rate
in the country is the world’s second highest (which only makes Cuba’s
rapidly aging population worse). Despite the left’s embrace of the LGBT
agenda, the fact that homosexuals are sent to concentration camps in
Cuba has not been especially well publicized in the mainstream media.
The situation for political prisoners in Cuba’s jails is so desperate
that many of them deliberately inject themselves with the HIV virus to
put themselves out of their misery. Meanwhile, each year thousands of
Cubans try to float across shark-infested waters to Florida on inner
tubes to flee the appalling reality of the Castro brothers’
dictatorship.
Despite these well-documented horrors, Fidel Castro has been
romanticized more so than perhaps any other tyrant. As a college
student, I spent many hours verbally sparring about Castro with naïve
undergraduates (and, once, a professor) who had the luxury of never
having to experience communism in practice; no matter how many
statistics that proved that the Cuban dictator turned his country into
one big gulag I fed them, their conviction that Castro was a wily,
handsome, articulate, and charismatic romantic rebel who has boldly
fought against Yankee imperialism for half a century remained unchanged.
However, not only naïve undergraduates have shown surprising
deference to the Cuban tyrant. Senator Bernie Sanders, who
unsuccessfully fought to be the Democratic Party’s presidential
candidate in this year’s primaries, openly praised Castro in 1985
(and has refused to retract his past statements). Meanwhile, although
Steven Spielberg has made films chronicling the horrors of the Holocaust
and of slavery, he has been much more forgiving of communist butchers: he has called his meeting with Castro “the best seven hours [he] ever spent.”
There are many other global leaders and celebrities who have openly
praised Castro. It would be an exaggeration to put Pope Francis in this
ignoble crowd. However, it would not be too much to call his attitude
towards Cuba Neville Chamberlain-style appeasement. During his 2015
pilgrimage to the country, the pontiff met with no dissidents. In fact,
while he did call for Cuba to open up to the world, he said nothing that
would make the regime uncomfortable. Rather, as is often with Francis,
his homily stuck to vague feel-good phrases. During his 1998 visit to
Cuba, Pope St. John Paul II used the word “freedom” seventeen times and
“justice” thirteen times during his homily. By contrast, Francis did not use either word at all during his homily in Havana. This appeasing attitude was so evident that even the Washington Post published an editorial criticizing the pontiff. That’s the WaPo, folks, not the National Review; there’s a reason why conservatives jokingly called the publication “Pravda on the Potomac” during the Cold War. It is true that Raul Castro recently released 787 prisoners
and claimed to be influenced by Francis’ call for heads of state to do
so during the Year of Mercy, but this was not a papal appeal to the
Cuban regime specifically. Fidel’s brother denies there are political
prisoners in Cuban jails despite the claims of human rights
organizations. (Read more.)
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From
The Federalist:
I don’t claim to speak for all urban white women who voted for Trump.
But I’m sure I’m not alone in my astonishment at the allegations thrown
around the social media echo chamber, accusing us of being racist,
self-hating misogynists.
I understand many of you opposed Trump
and feel afraid and frustrated, or just saddened and confused. I know it
is easy to lash out right now. But I don’t want to be subjected to
vitriolic tirades by people who claim to practice tolerance, then
project fury whenever their worldview is challenged. To quote
William Buckley Jr., “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other
views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are
other views.”
So I hope you will be so kind as to allow me to keep my anonymity while
trying to shed light on some of the questions and claims made by adamant
anti-Trumpers that have populated my news feed for the last few days. (Read more.)
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From
Inside Chic:
Since my children are older now and the older ones are only briefly in
town from college, they like to be with their friends as much as
possible. This year I’m going to host a multigenerational holiday
sing-a-long cocktail party. I have hired a person to play holiday tunes
on the piano, and I am inviting family and friends, as well as my
children’s friends and their parents! I know the kids won’t stay all
that long but it’s a nice way to catch up with everyone, and I like a
party where people have an activity to do sometimes. And after the
teenagers leave, I will still have the adults linger over cocktails for
some holiday cheer, plenty of champagne and lots of laughter. I don’t
believe in trying to make the holidays more complicated, but I do
believe in extending a little bit of extra effort and stopping to
celebrate to make them more enjoyable! (Read more.)
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From
The Christian Science Monitor:
When Christians fled the small town of Bartalla in August 2014 as
Islamic State militants swept toward them, then-14-year-old Ibrahim
Matti and his elderly mother stayed behind. Without a car, they waited
on a relative who promised to return for them after ferrying his own
family to safety. But by then, it was too late. Matti and his
mother, Jandark Nasi, both Assyrian Christians, spent more than two
years living under IS control in and around Mosul. They endured physical
violence, constant threats and intimidation, and forced conversion
before finally escaping as the Iraqi Army pushed into Mosul in recent
weeks.
They are among just a handful of Christians who have so far
emerged from territory controlled by the self-declared Islamic State
amid the Iraqi offensive that has retaken parts of northern Iraq. The
historic heartland of Assyrian Christians in Iraq was part of the
territory seized by the militants in 2014, and nearly all fled in the
face of IS requirements: convert, pay a tax, or die. The ordeal of Matti
and Ms. Nasi offers a glimpse of what life was like for those unable to
escape. (Read more.)
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From
Inside Chic:
Schedule your workouts, time in nature, meditation and sleep just like
you schedule your work appointments. Put them in your calendar and show
up on time! Being aware of what sends you off track and then finding
ways to overcome those obstacles will make things easier. If you are
someone that skips meals because you’re running around all day and then
binges on the first thing you see when you have a moment, keep a healthy
snack or meal already on hand. If you know you can’t get in a workout
on a particular day, try to sneak in extra movements in other ways. Pick
a parking spot that is a little further away from your destination,
take the stairs, or get out a stop early on the subway or bus. It
doesn’t need to be all or nothing. When it comes to sticking to a
routine setting workout goals you can achieve is one part, scheduling
your time to accommodate your workouts is another, but finding something
you like doing ensures you will actually want to do it! (Read more.)
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From
Once I Was a Clever Boy:
Looking for pictures of Westminster abbey I found these two
reconstructions of the medieval palace of Westminster and thought I
would post them as well. Both attempt to show Westminster at the
beginning of the sixteenth century. (Read more.)
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From
Faithwire:
Fidel Castro shattered — through mass-executions, mass-jailings, mass
larceny and exile — virtually every family on the island of Cuba. Many
opponents of the Castro regime qualify as the longest-suffering
political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps,
forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in
Fidel Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s
Gulag. Fidel Castro and Che Guevara beat ISIS to the game by over half a
century. As early as January 1959 they were filming their murders for
the media-shock value.
Fidel Castro also came closest of anyone in history to (wantonly) starting a worldwide nuclear war. In the above process Fidel Castro converted a highly-civilized nation
with a higher standard of living than much of Europe and swamped with
immigrants into a slum/sewer ravaged by tropical diseases and with the
highest suicide rate in the Western hemisphere.
Over TWENTY TIMES as many people (and counting) have died trying to escape Castro’s Cuba as died trying to escape East Germany.
Yet prior to Castroism Cuba received more immigrants per-capita than
almost any nation on earth—more than the U.S. did including the Ellis
Island years, in fact. Fidel Castro helped train and fund practically every terror group on earth, from the Weathermen to Puerto Rico’s Macheteros, from Argentina’s Montoneros, to Colombia’s FARC, from the Black Panthers to the IRA and from the PLO to AL Fatah. (Read more.)
Some commentary from TFP on the death of Castro:
However, when all is said and done about Castro, one thing is
certain. He was a man-symbol. He personified the dark ideals of his
communist Revolution in their most radical aspects. He was a sinister
human face who fascinated liberal capitalists, fawning socialites and
liberation theology clergymen over the decades. His power lay precisely
in his ability to be a man-symbol in a materialistic world that denies
the efficacy of symbols.
But dark symbol he was. Castro gave himself entirely to the cause to
which he was committed. He was willing to sacrifice the nation’s health, education and incredible wealth on the altar of international communism.
There is nothing he would not do, no alliance he would not make or
opposition that he would not eliminate to carry out his nefarious goals. (Read more.)
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From
Inside Chic:
Going back to antiquity, we started with the Egyptians, whose
obsession with cleanliness was such that they discriminated against
cultures whose members didn’t follow their own bathing customs; their
bathing rituals expressed a view of the bath as a font of hygiene,
health, and healing. The Greeks refined the language of tubs and basins
to the form that persists today, encouraged the habit of bathing as a
means of relaxation, and – in the belief that specific natural water
sources had been blessed by the gods – connected the ideas of cleansing
and healing…
Modernity, to be sure, offers many advantages over antiquity. But the
idea of the bath as a place of relaxation, reflection, and restoration,
developed by the ancients, is one that has never been improved upon –
all we can do is translate that timeless concept into a personal
reflection of contemporary life. (Read more.)
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