Our Recessional Culture

 From Tom Piatak at Chronicles:

This journey from Camelot to COVID was the result of many wrong turns. When it began, the foundation of American life had already started to rot, but the rot was largely hidden and resisted by still-powerful beliefs rooted in traditional ideas of duty and self-sacrifice. Today, though, the rot is unmistakable. The termites have been busy indeed since the 1960s, as one American institution after another was captured by the devotees of the New Left, and as more and more Americans came to accept fatuous promises of “liberation,” running the gamut from “if it feels good, do it” to “greed is good.”

As we Americans grope for solutions to the myriad problems we face, we would do well to recall the words of a wise Englishman writing at his nation’s zenith.  Rudyard Kipling, asked to commemorate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, wrote a poem of admonition, not celebration. In “Recessional,” Kipling warned his countrymen that they risked going the way of “Nineveh and Tyre” if they forgot the religious basis of their civilization: “God of our fathers, known of old/Lord of our far-flung battle-line,/Beneath whose awful Hand we hold/Dominion over palm and pine—/Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,/Lest we forget—lest we forget!” (Read more.)

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The Exotic State of Matter

 From SciTech Daily:

Using a novel technique, scientists working at the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have found evidence for a quantum spin liquid, a state of matter that is promising as a building block for the quantum computers of tomorrow.

Researchers discovered the exciting behavior while studying the so-called electron spins in the compound ruthenium trichloride. Their findings, published recently in the journal Nature Physics, show that electron spins interact across the material, effectively lowering the overall energy. This type of behavior — consistent with a quantum spin liquid — was detected in ruthenium trichloride at high temperatures and in high magnetic fields.

Spin liquids, first theorized in 1973, remain something of a mystery. Despite some materials showing promising signs for this state of matter, it is extremely challenging to definitively confirm its existence. However, there is great interest in them because scientists believe they could be used for the design of smarter materials in a variety of applications, such as quantum computing.

This study provides strong support that ruthenium trichloride is a spin liquid, said physicist Kim Modic, a former graduate student who worked at the MagLab’s pulsed field facility and is now an assistant professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria.

“I think this paper provides a fresh perspective on ruthenium trichloride and demonstrates a new way to look for signatures of spin liquids,” said Modic, the paper’s lead author.

For decades, physicists have extensively studied the charge of an electron, which carries electricity, paving the way for advances in electronics, energy, and other areas. But electrons also have a property called spin. Scientists want to also leverage the spin aspect of electrons for technology, but the universal behavior of spins is not yet fully understood. (Read more.)

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Cary Grant the Legend

From The London Review of Books:

Archibald Alexander Leach was born on 18 January 1904 in a terraced house in Bristol. His father, Elias, was a clothes presser by trade. His mother, Elsie, had nothing to do but look after her men and, as Archie would realise, she had a need to be in control that could get out of hand. Elias was less than faithful, so Archie carried the extra weight of pleasing his mother. Archie didn’t know that there had been a previous son, who had died just before the age of one. That he didn’t know this is a sign of the oppressive secrecy that affected so much of life in Britain – and hasn’t gone away. Why do the British act so well? Perhaps because so much feeling has been pushed beneath the surface. To come to terms with Grant on screen is to wonder about the things his characters know that aren’t in the script.

It was not a happy household, but it seemed stable enough despite Elsie’s fits of temper. Until one day, when he was 11, Archie came home from school and Mum wasn’t there. Had she gone away? Would she come back? The matter was suspended in doubt. Elias wondered aloud if she was dead. In fact, he had placed her in an asylum in the Bristol suburb of Fishponds because she was ‘queer in the head’ – or more than he could take. She heard voices in the walls and felt she was being watched. Elsie’s confinement seems to have been accomplished without much medical questioning. So she was kept in a building that Archie knew and which he must have passed now and then without a thought. Glancy is careful to say that this was not a Dickensian asylum, or a ‘snake pit’. For that period, it was a decent place. Still, Elsie was held against her will and without anyone asking whether she should have been there.

Archie was quite good at school but had no taste for it, and no need once his mother was gone. He preferred picture shows and music hall at the Bristol Hippodrome. So he went away, too. He was apprenticed to the Pender Troupe of variety players and learned to be a ‘tumbler’. He could do a backflip with a full-body twist and tease a girl with straight-faced insolence. He’d been just a kid when he picked up the habit of parting his hair on the wrong (or right) side. Now he was growing to be tall, dark and handsome. The stage meant so much: the warmth from audiences was the most convincing he had known.

In the summer of 1920 Archie went with the troupe to New York and a rising career in vaudeville. That took him from 16 to 26, by which point his physical dexterity was matched by an ability to pass in America as debonair, charming and easy-going. Those would be the keynotes of Cary Grant. But he was still Archie, until the actress Fay Wray urged a name change (they had performed together in 1931 in a musical, Nikki, which flopped on Broadway, and he was smitten with her). ‘Cary’ was the guy he had played in Nikki; ‘Grant’ came out of the phone book. Thus equipped, he took on Hollywood. Glancy notes that in his screen debut, This Is the Night (1932), Grant kept his hands stuffed in his pockets because he didn’t know what else to do with them. But in the next few years, he benefited from playing with Marlene Dietrich in Blonde Venus, and with Mae West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. Best of all – albeit in a big failure – he met George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on a film, Sylvia Scarlett, that was too daring for its time, in which he played Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con artist, and felt able to be himself. (Read more.)

 

From The Criterion Collection:

Festival director Charlotte Crofts has recorded a Zoom conversation with Mark Glancy, who explains that, with his new book, Cary Grant: The Making of a Hollywood Legend, he aims to counter the prevailing perception of Grant as a man whose public persona belied his private life. The debonair hail fellow well met we see on the screen was portrayed in the slew of biographies that appeared in the fifteen years or so after his death in 1986 as a dark bundle of deep insecurities. Glancy, who has been digging deep into archives in Los Angeles and Bristol, argues that the truth is more complicated, that the man had his bright sides as well.

It’s hard not to wonder what Glancy might have to say about Scott Eyman’s new book, Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise. “Biographers believe that lives resolve into themes, and the theme of Cary Grant’s life was anxiety, because he always had difficulty assimilating Archie’s angers and fears into his prodigious creation of a predominantly suave acting alter ego,” writes Eyman in a brief introduction at Air Mail. “He made no secret about any of this. His famous line—‘Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant’—was not a joke. Rather, it was an admission.”

Eyman has written books on the friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart, on the advent of sound in the movies, the style of Hollywood’s golden age, and on the lives of John Wayne, Cecil B. DeMille, John Ford, Louis B. Mayer, Mary Pickford, and Ernst Lubitsch. In Cary Grant, Eyman “supplies what feels like the ‘true gen’—the real lowdown—on the directors, producers, and studio heads with whom Cary Grant worked,” writes Joseph Epstein in his review for the Wall Street Journal. (Read more.)

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Vote for President Trump

 The most pro-life president in history. From Life News:

While Biden supports abortion on demand up to birth and would force Christians to fund abortions, President Donald Trump has compiled a sterling pro-life record. When it comes to Christian issues, he has gone above and beyond to protect pro-life Christians from funding abortions and protected Christian medical professionals from being forced to participate in killing babies in abortions.

In a new OP-ed at Christian Post, Ryan Helfenbein of Liberty University talks about the pro-life record President Trump has put together during his first term:

President Trump is the most pro-life president in history. With the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, the President has now placed 3 conservative on the Supreme Court and appointed over 200 federal judges who are right-leaning, pro-life, constitutionalist judges. He was the first sitting president to ever attend the annual March for Life. Trump has sought to defund Planned Parenthood; reformed Title X funds to no longer fund abortion facilities; reinstituted the Mexico City policy, which prevents federal funding for private abortion providers; and ceased funding for the United Nations Population Fund, which “supports, or participates in the management of, a program of coercive abortion or involuntary sterilization.”

These are just a few of Trump’s pro-life policies and accomplishments in just three and half years. Biden and the Democrats, however, support tax-payer funded abortion on demand with virtually no restrictions, including up to the moment just before birth. This a bloodstained curse upon our country and should by no means be treated with moral equivalency.

Helfenbein also reminded readers that President Trump has been a champion for religious liberty issues.

President Trump signed an executive order in his first few months of office, protecting both free speech and religious liberty. Attorney General Bill Barr has also worked to protect churches and religious groups during Covid-19 who have been unfairly targeted.

By contrast, the Obama administration with Joe Biden, waged war on religious liberty going after organizations like the Little Sisters of the Poor for refusing to provide contraceptives to employees, including the Plan B abortion pill – a clear violation of religious conviction and liberty. The Trump administration, however, promptly created an exemption to protect the religious groups from this mandate.

Be closes his piece this way:

In 2020, Christians have no moral dilemma except that of their own making.  This is not a time for foolish pride, moral obfuscation or aesthetic spiritual nonsense. These challenges are real but the choice is simple. This is a time for choosing.

I choose life, faith and freedom. I choose President Trump. (Read more.)

 

Another reason not to vote for Biden is his and his son's former corrupt dealings with foreign governments. From The Western Journal:

Documents provided by former Hunter Biden business associate Tony Bobulinksi have been authenticated by a Senate committee after a thorough review, according to a report. So much for blaming Russians or other foreign entities for stunning reports that could undercut Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s campaign for the White House. The whistleblower who credibly provided Fox News host Tucker Carlson with evidence and a firsthand account linking the former vice president to his son’s business dealings has had his side of the story legitimized. Bobulinski is no Kremlin operative, which has already been confirmed by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and the FBI. The Daily Caller reported Wednesday that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee found that documents, including text messages, emails and other pieces of evidence from Bobulinksi, have been recognized as being bona fide. (Read more.)

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The Unheavenly City at Fifty

 From Thomas Sowell at Claremont Review of Books:

Even those who disagree with Banfield’s prescriptions—on this or other issues—can nevertheless understand the importance of his highlighting inconvenient facts that so many others avoid. Another issue on which many of today’s intelligentsia have not yet caught up to what Banfield said half a century ago is the effect of minimum wage laws on the employment of young people—and especially non-white young people.

Over the years, vast amounts of ingenuity have been deployed by some economists to avoid the obvious fact that minimum wage laws can make unskilled labor too expensive for most employers to hire many inexperienced workers. The result has been disastrously high levels of unemployment for black teenagers, as politicians pass “living wage” laws that make it difficult for young blacks to get any wage at all.

The Unheavenly City produces both data and a devastating graph, showing that, when the federal minimum wage law—the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938—was rendered ineffective by runaway inflation during the 1940s, teenage unemployment in 1948 was a fraction of what it later became, after a series of minimum wage increases began in 1950, in order to catch up with the effects of inflation.

Perhaps most telling, there was virtually no difference in the unemployment rate between white and non-white teenagers in 1948. But a huge racial gap in teenage unemployment rates opened up as the minimum wage rate increased. For some people, racial gaps are automatically taken as proof of racism. But was there no racism in 1948? That would come as quite a surprise to those of us who actually lived through that era.

Just as there is no free lunch, there is no free racism in a market where supply and demand set prices, including the price of labor. By definition, racists prefer one race to another. But, like other people, racists tend to prefer themselves most of all. There is a limit to how much money most racists are prepared to lose by discrimination.

Even in South Africa during the era of apartheid, there were some occupations in competitive industries where black workers outnumbered white workers—in occupations where it was illegal to hire any black workers. White employers responsible for this situation might well have voted for the white supremacy laws they were violating. But it cost nothing to vote for white supremacy, while it could cost plenty to pass up opportunities to make profits by hiring black workers. (Read more.)

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The Necropolis of Almazán

 From EL PAÍS:

The study, written by the archaeologists and biologists Manuel Retuerce Velasco, Luis Alejandro García García, Jesús Herrerín López and Ainara Acebo Pérez, attempts to shed light on the odd location of the graves. Researchers point out that in the 12th century, the church of Santa María de Calatañazor was built near the eastern wall, and that the remains could belong to the church’s cemetery, as the church itself was replaced in the 16th century by the one currently occupying the site.

The authors of the study believe there are three possible explanations for the treatment of the bodies, which have been challenging to reach. “The excavation turned out to be quite difficult due to the state in which they [the corpses] were found – very fragile, fragmented and not very consistent,” says Manuel Retuerce, who teaches archeology at Madrid’s Complutense University. The remains that they managed to remove were transported to a laboratory, while those located directly under the wall and whose tombs extended into the inside of the walled perimeter were left where they were.

The researchers believe that before these graves were covered by the wall, they were in all likelihood visible on the surface, though this appears to have posed no obstacle to the building plans. And while the most logical hypothesis, according to Retuerce, is that the tombs belonged to Christians, the fact they are staggered and covered with wood does not completely rule out that the dead were Jewish or Muslim. Wood was a common material in medieval times for all three religions. In Christian and Hebrew cemeteries, the coffin lids were made of wood and, with regard to Muslim burials, a grave dug out in the earth could also be covered with wooden planks known as alwah.

Although archaeologists are more inclined to believe these were Christian tombs, Retuerce points out that if it were a Jewish necropolis, it would more easily explain why the city wall was built over it, as any opposition from this religious minority “could be more easily disregarded than if the necropolis had been Christian.” 

(Read more.)

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Pied-à-Terre Proper

 From Sarah Richardson Design:

One part hotel chic and one part urban retreat, this downtown Toronto condo sits high in the sky overlooking Lake Ontario and the bustling city streets. It’s not every day that we’re asked to design a condo that looks like a hotel, so we jumped at the chance to convert a 2 bedroom + den condo into a 3 bedroom hotel-like abode complete with separate media systems and in-room amenities so our clients can host friends and entertain in the big city.

After months of planning, load in day went off without a hitch. But it took some problem solving along the way to get us there. Read on to discover how we tackled every challenge, and make note of each solution to help you conquer your next design dilemma. (Read more.)

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Between Christ the King and “We Have No King But Caesar”

 From a few years ago but more valid than ever. From One Peter Five:

This month of November begins with the great Solemnity of All Saints. But in the traditional Roman calendar, All Saints is preceded shortly before by an even greater feast—that of Christ the King, the One who creates and sanctifies the citizens, ambassadors, and soldiers of His Kingdom.

When Pope Pius XI instituted the feast of Christ the King in 1925, he was, one might say, supplying in the Church’s calendar the missing invisible cause of All Saints, as well as making clear just what the mission of the saints in history is: to be the living members of the Mystical Body under Christ its Head, and to extend this body across the whole earth. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the King of all men, all peoples, all nations, and His saints are those who, taking up their cross and following Him, have conquered their own souls and won over the souls of many others for this Kingdom.

Pope Pius XI knew that in modern political circumstances, it was absolutely necessary to make this truth explicit, as he did in the great encyclical Quas Primas of December 11, 1925:

All men, whether collectively or individually, are under the dominion of Christ. In Him is the salvation of the individual; in Him is the salvation of society. … He is the author of happiness and true prosperity for every man and for every nation. If, therefore, the rulers of nations wish to preserve their authority, to promote and increase the prosperity of their countries, they will not neglect the public duty of reverence and obedience to the rule of Christ. … When once men recognize, both in private and in public life, that Christ is King, society will at last receive the great blessings of real liberty, well-ordered discipline, peace, and harmony. … That these blessings may be abundant and lasting in Christian society, it is necessary that the kingship of our Savior should be as widely as possible recognized and understood, and to the end nothing would serve better than the institution of a special feast in honor of the Kingship of Christ.

The right which the Church has from Christ Himself, to teach mankind, to make laws, to govern peoples in all that pertains to their eternal salvation—that right was denied [in the Enlightenment era]. Then gradually the religion of Christ came to be likened to false religions and to be placed ignominiously on the same level with them. It was then put under the power of the State and tolerated more or less at the whim of princes and rulers. … There were even some nations who thought they could dispense with God, and that their religion should consist in impiety and the neglect of God. The rebellion of individuals and States against the authority of Christ has produced deplorable consequences.

That was 1925. In Advent of 1969, a tidal wave of changes in Catholic worship came rolling through the Church. As we all know, among these changes was the moving of the feast of Christ the King from the last Sunday of October to the last Sunday of the liturgical year, at the end of November. Or at least that is what we think we know; it’s what I used to think, too. But that is not what actually happened.

[....]

 When teaching Catholic social doctrine to college students, I never cease to be surprised at how many of them display the knee-jerk reaction of automatically assuming that monarchy is “mostly evil” and that democracy is “obviously good.” This seems to be a secular dogma imposed by our age and drilled in from tender years, especially in public schools. I like to shake people up by handing out the following list of royal saints and blesseds—the kings, queens, princes, princesses, dukes, duchesses, and other ruling aristocrats who are venerated, beatified, or canonized by Catholics, Orthodox, or Anglicans. Yes, this is a somewhat eclectic and ecumenical list, but surely it offers food for thought, since all of these individuals in obvious ways promoted and defended Christianity (and often Christendom, its full flowering) using their God-given political authority.[5] (Read more.)

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Medieval Monastery in Gloucester Rediscovered

 From the BBC:

The remains of the 13th Century Carmelite friary have been found beneath a demolished multi-storey car park. Historians knew roughly where Whitefriars had stood, but its exact location was a mystery. The dig, ahead of redevelopment work as part of the regeneration of the city's King's Quarter, took place in July. City archaeologist Andrew Armstrong said it was "very exciting" finally to reveal the exact location of "this long-lost friary".

"For around 300 years, Whitefriars played an active part in Gloucester and produced some notable friars, including Nicholas Cantelow (or Cantilupe) in the 15th Century.

"Seeing and documenting this site will serve to underline, and recognise, the place of the friary in the city's history."

Archaeologists from Gloucester City Council and Cotswold Archaeology carried out the dig on the site of a recently demolished multi-storey car park on Bruton Way. (Read more.)

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