The Nemours Estate

 From Bright:

A good place to begin exploring the area is where the story started. The Hagley Museum and Library features the restored original gunpowder mills, the Eleutherian Mills estate where five generations of du Ponts resided, historic gardens and orchard, and the hillside village where workers lived. The residence is packed with antique furnishings and valuable art. It’s also home to the second-largest museum collection of original patent models, topped only by the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.

In the powder yards strung out along the Brandywine River visitors can view historic mill buildings that include a working 19th-century machine shop, along with the wooden Birkenhead waterwheel and a coal-fired steam engine. They also learn about the process of manufacturing gunpowder.

Workers’ Hill provides a glimpse of the lives of original mill employees. It includes a foreman’s home, a Sunday school for children and a garden where factory families grew vegetables. The modest plots contrast with the elaborate ornamental plantings at du Pont homes.

The 77-room Nemours Estate was constructed by Alfred I. du Pont, the great-great-grandson of Pierre, for his second wife, Alicia. It was modeled after a chateau that was built during the reign of French King Louis XV and occupied by Queen Marie Antoinette. The setting is enhanced by acres of formal gardens, greenhouses and a planted maze area. (Read more.)

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Failing to Recruit

 From Sara Carter:

Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville said the United States’ inability to make military recruitment numbers is a “national security emergency.” Since the National Guard Association of the United States issued a statement June 28 explaining that every branch of the U.S. military has been having difficulty meeting recruiting goals for fiscal year 2022.

Struggling the most is the Army, which stated they have only recruited 40% of its total goal thus far in fiscal year 2022 with only three months left. A devastating reality is not just that the military is unable to recruit prospects, but that the number of qualified candidates and recruits are severely lacking.

The Army’s official website made the terrifying announcement that they have not faced this tough of a labor market since the military became completely volunteer based in 1973. “71% of youth do not qualify for military service because of obesity, drugs, physical and mental health problems, misconduct, and aptitude,” according to the Army recruiting website.

Another blow to recruiting which was pointed out by Senator Tuberville is that many recruits are ineligible due to their refusal (often upon religious ground, he said) to get the Covid-19 vaccinations. The Senator said he will continue to push for hearings on the issue with the Senate Armed Services Committee, on which he serves.

The Alabama Daily News reports on specifics, as well as the role the Biden administration has played into what has become a national security emergency:

The Army has shown hesitation to grant religious exemptions for its current soldiers. The branch released a statement in June along with data that showed that 4,736 active soldiers had filed for permanent religious exemptions from the vaccine as of June 23. Only 16 of those have been approved, and 1,185 have been denied. (Read more.)

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Wealth in Jane Austen’s Fiction

 From Wondrium Daily:

Austen’s own personal philosophy of class, economics, and money remains much debated. Whether we look into her stories and see a ratification of her era’s emerging market capitalism, or whether we see a deep skepticism of it, one must agree that her novels manage to raise enduring economic questions.

Austen does this successfully as her fiction focuses on the proper role of wealth, landownership, and social status in relationships and in communities, as well as on whether or how wealth ought to be passed down from generation to generation. Her fiction imagines a world in which moral worth, and economic value, aren’t strictly tied together. Qualities of character and mind might matter more than the class one was born into.

Jane Austen’s fiction also makes us look closely where all the wealth is going, how it’s being moved around and consolidated, used and misused. She looks at how young men and women are compelled to serve as economic carriers and pawns in their families and communities. Austen shows us how wealth is structurally tethered to social status, yet need not be tethered to opinions about character and moral worth. (Read more.)

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That Ascot Feeling...

 From Redbook:

The Royal Ascot has been one of the most popular horse racing events in Britain since it was founded by Queen Anne in 1711, and the weeklong affair is guaranteed to be attended by the majority of the British royal family. While Queen Elizabeth did not appear in 2022, several members of her family showed up throughout the week, including Prince Charles, Princess Anne, Princess Beatrice, Peter Phillips, Zara Tindall, and more.

There's a strict dress code at the Royal Ascot; men are "required to wear a full morning suit with waistcoat and either a black or grey top hat at all times," and women need to wear hats, and dresses that cover their shoulders. The royals, too, often have to wear name tags. (Read more.)

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Particularly Dishonest

 From The Federalist:

The successful effort to change hundreds of laws and processes across the country to enable tens of millions of unsupervised ballots to flood the system was led by Marc Elias, the same Democrat attorney who had been behind the creation of the Russia collusion hoax, the lie that Trump didn’t win in 2016 but stole the election by colluding with Russia.

Democrats had been working for decades to accomplish these changes. For nearly four decades, it was Ginsberg’s job to fight them. As the Republican Party’s top election lawyer, Ginsberg was supposed to be the person responsible for pushing back against coordinated and well-funded Democrat efforts to expand unsupervised voting and to make it difficult to scrutinize the resulting ballots that were far more susceptible to fraud.

It’s not surprising that Republicans fared so poorly against the coordinated Democrat campaign to water down election integrity over the last 20 years given that Ginsberg was the guy supposedly leading their fight. (Read more.)

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Origins of Planned Parenthood

 From John Zmirak at The Stream:

Okay, to summarize so far: An influential strain of Spiritualism, to which Sanger was exposed by her long friendship with Havelock Ellis, taught that pregnant women can mold their unborn children. If women in distress, poverty, or believers in “reactionary” religions such as Christianity have children, those babies will be marked by their negative spirits. Hence the need for eugenics.

But if women of a “superior” sort, in contact with “advanced” spirits reproduce, they can produce a “higher” sort of child. A super-race, if you will. What advanced spirits would in fact be available for such a procedure? Certainly not the angels obedient to God. When occultists summon spirits, spirits often do answer. Ones with names like “Moloch,” “Belial,” and “Mammon.”

This Spiritualist claim makes sense of Sanger’s otherwise murky promises that unleashing our sexual energies can produce a race of virtual gods on earth, inhabiting a worldly paradise. Schwab find an apposite quote of Sanger’s to illustrate this:

When the womb becomes fruitful through the desire of an aspiring love, another Newton will come forth to unlock further the secrets of the earth and the stars. There will come a Plato who will be understood, a Socrates who will drink no hemlock, and a Jesus who will not die upon the cross. These and the race that is to be in America await upon a motherhood that is to be sacred because it is free.

Of course, such power to remake the human race comes at a price. The price is sacrifice, blood-sacrifice of “inferior” children who must be destroyed. Schwab offers more citations to prove this point:

So in a very real sense, in the message of Margaret Sanger, the aborted fetus was a sacrifice that would allow for the manifestation of “new woman”, and the incarnation of an inverted Christ figure. In Woman and the New Race, Sanger openly argues for the universality of infanticide and child sacrifice as “the efforts of the feminine spirit to liberate itself”, literally using Canaanite and pagan Greek societies as an example. She speaks constantly of the peculiar “feminine spirit” whose need for infanticide and fetecide was an implacable expression of its nature. She plays coy, writing of a “secret order” of radicals and repeatedly frames women who have abortions as “martyrs” who were “making a sacrifice”, hinting at the unspoken belief that murder of the fetus is a sacrament.

Which is exactly what the Temple of Satan is asserting today, in formal legal briefs submitted to U.S. courts, claiming that abortion is a religious rite, protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. (Read more.)

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Katherine of Aragon's Cipher

 From Smithsonian:

In July 1531, Tudor king Henry VIII rode out of Windsor Castle with his mistress, Anne Boleyn, at his side. He left without warning, failing to bid farewell to Catherine of Aragon, his wife and queen of 22 years. When Catherine sent a letter to Henry inquiring after his health a few days later, he declared that he “cared not for her adieux.” The couple never met in person again.

Henry’s harsh response was prompted by the queen’s refusal to agree to a divorce. Despite the fact that Henry had abandoned her (and would, over the next five years, exile her to a series of increasingly decrepit estates), Catherine remained steadfast in her attempts to preserve the pair’s marriage. Even as Henry publicly announced Anne as his new queen, Catherine refused to relent, maintaining that she was the king’s one true wife until her death in January 1536 at age 50.

 Now, almost 500 years later, Vanessa Braganza, a literary scholar and self-described “book detective” at Harvard University, has uncovered a long-overlooked example of the Tudor queen’s defiance. As Jennifer Schuessler reports for the New York Times, Braganza used a method she describes as “early modern Wordle” to decode a cipher containing the hidden words “Henricvs Rex” (Henry the king) and “Katherine” (an alternate spelling of the queen’s first name). Created around 1532, the intricate puzzle appears in the Jewellery Book, a volume of jewelry designs by Tudor court painter Hans Holbein. (Read more.)

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Catholic School Enrollment is Falling Fast

 From The Pillar:

The U.S. Catholic school population has been declining for decades, and the pace of that decline was accelerating even before the pandemic began. The pandemic has sharpened declines, but some Catholic leaders see in the crisis a chance to sharpen and showcase the unique offerings of Catholic schools.

A report due to be released Feb. 17 by the National Catholic Educational Association shows that 1,626,291 students are enrolled in Catholic schools in 2021, a decline of more than 111,000 from 2020. The sharpest drop-off came in Catholic preschools, which enrolled 44,000 fewer students in 2021 than they did in 2020.

Between 2010 and 2020, Catholic schools lost an average 38,204 of students per year. But the NCEA data suggests the pace of attrition has sped up over the last decade— between 2019 and 2020, Catholic schools lost 52,066 students. 

The pandemic has hastened the decline. Even if preschoolers were not counted, 66,000 fewer students were enrolled in Catholic schools in 2021 than in 2020. (Read more.)

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The Bee is a Symbol of Our Lady

 From Catholicism:

The bee is a symbol of Our Lady. Because of its good working habits, the small honeybee is a well-known symbol for work, good order, and diligence. Less commonly known is that the bee is a representation of virginity. The worker bees have no part in the reproduction of its species, except for that of feeding the baby bees. The responsibilities of “bee parenting” are left to the queen bee and the drones. Since virginity is a virtue we find exemplified to its highest capacity in Our Lady, the bee quite naturally becomes one of Her symbols.

Dom Gueranger, O.S.B., in his reading for the feast of Candlemas in The Liturgical Year,  quotes St. Anselm, the Archbishop of Canturbury, who “bids us consider three things in the blest Candle: the wax, the wick, and the flame. The wax, … which is the production of the virginal bee, is the flesh of Our Lord [supplied by the Virgin Mary]; the wick, which is within, is His Soul; the flame, which burns on the top, is His Divinity.” (Read more.)

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