‘These Are Dark Times For our Nation’

 From American Greatness:

The FBI on Monday conducted an unannounced raid of Mar-a-Lago, former President Donald Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Florida.

“These are dark times for our Nation, as my beautiful home, Mar-A-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, is currently under siege, raided, and occupied by a large group of FBI agents,” Trump wrote in a press release. The former president did not say why FBI agents were conducting the search warrant, but noted that they even broke into his safe.

Nothing like this has ever happened to a President of the United States before. After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate. It is prosecutorial misconduct, the weaponization of the Justice System, and an attack by Radical Left Democrats who desperately don’t want me to run for President in 2024, especially based on recent polls, and who will likewise do anything to stop Republicans and Conservatives in the upcoming Midterm Elections. Such an assault could only take place in broken, Third-World Countries. Sadly, America has now become one of those Countries, corrupt at a level not seen before. They even broke into my safe! What is the difference between this and Watergate, where operatives broke into the Democrat National Committee? Here, in reverse, Democrats broke into the home of the 45th President of the United States.

The political persecution of President Donald J. Trump has been going on for years, with the now fully debunked Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, Impeachment Hoax #1, Impeachment Hoax #2, and so much more, it just never ends. It is political targeting at the highest level!

Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 E-mails AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress. Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable. She even took antique furniture, and other items from the White House.

I stood up to America’s bureaucratic corruption, I restored power to the people, and truly delivered for our Country, like we have never seen before. The establishment hated it. Now, as they watch my endorsed candidates win big victories, and see my dominance in all polls, they are trying to stop me, and the Republican Party, once more. The lawlessness, political persecution, and Witch Hunt must be exposed and stopped.

Constitutional Lawyer Alan Dershowitz explained the gravity of the situation on Newsmax, as news of the raid broke. “The law is clear, you don’t engage in a raid unless you’ve exhausted all the other remedies,” he said. “Raids are a last resort.” (Read more.)

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The West Needs to Grow Up

 From UnHerd:

I find it useful, in trying to parse the madness of that culture war, to see the time we are living in as what I have come to call a culture of inversion. The West’s ongoing decline has caused its elites to lose faith in their cultural inheritance, and this loss of faith has now reached pathological proportions. As a result, the leading lights in Western society — the cultural elites, and sometimes the political and economic elites too — are dedicated not to upholding the cultural forms they inherited, but to turning them on their heads, or erasing them entirely.

In the 50 years I have spent on earth, most of it in post-imperial Britain, that loss of faith has manifested everywhere. If you want to “get on” in Britain — which means to win the approval of the upper-middle class elite which runs the show — it has long been an unspoken rule that you cannot be seen to commit yourself to any of the pillars of the old orthodoxy which two World Wars fatally wounded and the Sixties counterculture decisively finished off.

Patriotism, Christianity, cultural conservatism, sexual modesty, even a mild nostalgia for a vanished rural England or a love of once-canonical novels: all are more or less verboten, and the attitude towards them is rapidly hardening. Until recently simply giggled at or patronised, these kinds of views in the 2020s may see you labelled a “white supremacist”, or the more general but still-lethal “hater”. The old world is again running up like parchment in the fire, and nobody who wants to be part of the new one can be seen to defend it. (Read more.)

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Bed Burials

 From Live Science:

On rare occasions in medieval mainland Europe, the cream of the crop — those who were wealthy or noble — were sometimes buried as if they were going to sleep, interred on their beds in what is known as a bed burial. However, it was unclear how this practice spread to England. Now, new research reveals that bed burials gained traction in the seventh century A.D. along with the spread of Christianity and soon became a common burial rite for women.

After analyzing 72 bed burials across Europe, ranging from Slovakia to England, a researcher found that England's bed burials held only female remains. She concluded that the funerary practice in Europe occurred at a time when women were moving around more as Christian wives married non-Christian husbands, according to a new study published online June 13 in the journal Medieval Archeology(opens in new tab).

"Bed burials were something that was specifically imported by women who were moving around at that very specific point in time [across Europe]," said Emma Brownlee, the study's sole author and a research fellow in archaeology at Girton College and a fellow at the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, both of which are within the University of Cambridge in England. "As part of this conversion movement, men were moving, but not at the same extent as women, who were bringing these burial rites with them as they migrated [as missionaries], causing it to take on these associations of femininity and Christianity in England." (Read more.)

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The Priory

 From Country Life:

The Priory, in the village of Steventon, is undoubtedly appealing and somehow encompasses centuries' worth of history to form a welcoming, Grade II listed family home.

‘Every house tells a story, but few are as steeped in history as this one. Everything about this lovely house tells you it has been a much loved and enjoyed family home, and will undoubtedly be for the next custodians too,’ says Property Agent, Huw Warren about The Priory. Some properties omit such a strong sense of cosiness and character, that you can almost feel it radiating out from the photos. The Priory, in the Oxfordshire village of Steventon, is one such property. (Read more.)

 

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The Ghost of Christian Past

 From American Reformer:

Holland’s 2019 book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World landed like a bombshell on the complacently atheistic world of the British intelligentsia, and continues to send shockwaves through the academy and popular discourse. In it, he courageously contends that “To live in a Western country is to live in a society still utterly saturated by Christian concepts and assumptions….The West, increasingly empty though the pews may be, remains firmly moored to its Christian past” (13). Indeed, the very fact that this is so hard to see is itself evidence of Christianity’s total transformation of Western history: “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilisation that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted” (17).

Holland writes neither as a Christian (though he has since tentatively re-affirmed the faith in which he was raised) nor as an apologist for Christianity per se. Throughout his gripping narrative (even his critics agree that Holland is one of the most gifted writers of historical nonfiction alive today), Holland pulls no punches about the failures of Christians throughout the centuries to live up to their own ideals, as church leaders–like other sinners–have often lusted after wealth, and control. But the key point, he stresses, is that at the very least, they had ideals of love, mercy, and universal justice that they could fail to live up to—and, crucially, were often astonishingly self-critical about their own failures. Over and over he notes the curious tendency of Christian civilizations to be riddled with self-doubt about their own exploits. It is fashionable today to malign the evils of British imperialism, even as we romanticize the empires of pagan antiquity. “Yet the British,” writes Holland,

despite the certitude felt by many of them that their empire was a blessing bestowed on the world by heaven, could not entirely share in the swagger of the [Persian] Great King. Pride in their dominion over palm and pine was accompanied by a certain nervousness. The sacrifice demanded by their God was a humble and a contrite heart. To rule foreign peoples—let alone to plunder them of their wealth, or to settle their lands, or to hook their cities on opium—was also, for a Christian people, never quite to forget that their Saviour had lived as a slave, not the master, of a mighty empire (429).

The irony of modern discourse is that, for all the vitriol poured on Christians for their failure to love those who are different, care for the marginalized, or stand up for the rights of women, few pause to consider why we should care about doing any of these things. Certainly the pre-Christian worlds of pagan antiquity did not. For your average Persian, Greek, or Roman, argues Holland, it was self-evident that foreigners and the poor were the scum of the earth, good for little except enslavement, and that women’s bodies existed chiefly for the gratification of powerful men. Holland goes out of his way to remind the reader that crucifixion, before it became a symbol of Christ’s triumph, was a symbol of Roman brutality, an ingeniously cruel form of torture that signified the stark power politics of the ancient world. The fact that the Christians would dare celebrate the ignoble end of their leader in a death fit only for slaves is proof enough of the sheer radicalism of the “Christian revolution”; the fact that we scarcely bat an eye at the sight of a crucifix attests to the astounding success of that revolution. (Read more.)

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Saint Olaf and the End of the Viking World

 From Catholicism:

One thousand years ago, an entire world was coming to an end. It was  the world of the pagan Vikings. It would be replaced by another: that of Christian Scandinavia. The vanished world and the one that replaced it are not very well known to most U.S. Catholics. Most of us tend to think of the history of the Faith largely as it has been lived in Ireland and in lands that were once part of the Roman Empire, especially ones whose shores are washed by the Mediterranean-Italy, France, Spain.

Such an outlook is deplorably narrow. It ignores the very large role that the Scandinavians were playing in Europe one thousand years ago, that their activities as traders, artisans, mariner-explorers and warriors were far from being confined to the Scandinavian lands. For example, St. Vladimir, Prince of Kievan Rus in what we now know as Ukraine and whose conversion to the Faith presaged the conversion of all Russia, was certainly of Viking stock, certainly a descendent of a long line of Scandinavian trader-warriors who built fortified towns, including Kiev, all along the north-south waterways of Russia from the Baltic to the Black Sea.

Further, the Scandinavian influence has extended all the way over here to America, especially to the American heartland, the Midwest, especially the northern Midwest, where so many descendants of the Vikings settled in the 19th century and early in the 20th. We want with this article to dispel some of the ignorance of Scandinavia that prevails among U.S. Catholics. Special attention will be paid to the Scandinavian saint whose name is probably best known after that of St. Bridget, a Swede. This is to speak of St. Olaf, who was King of Norway at the dawn of the Second Millennium.

The year of his birth is usually given as 995. It is certain that he died in battle on July 29, 1030. His death can be dated with certainty because it took place during a total eclipse of the sun-dramatic circumstances for the men on the scene who did not know the eclipse was coming. “God help me!” he cried as he fell, and then continued to pray as his lifeblood flowed from his wounds.

His praying thus is not the only edifying thing that can be told about him, as we conceive the edifying in modern times, but there are no pious legends attached to St. Olaf, no legends of the sort often associated with saints-especially martyrs-who died before rationalism turned history into-historicism. On the other hand, legends about his ferocity-most would say brutality-abound. A couple will here be related, but readers must be warned the stories may shock. That is because we are used nowadays to killing being done out of sight, as by cluster bombs dropped on a marketplace from three miles in the Serbian sky, instead of with a battle-axe face-to-face with an armed opponent. The stories can even leave us wondering how such a one as Olaf could be so widely venerated for his sanctity that within a year of his death his remains would be disinterred by a bishop, put by that bishop in a new coffin and placed on the high altar of the grandest church in the land, St. Clement’s, in what is now the city of Trondheim. Yet, that happened, even as the national arms of Norway, a nation that has been Protestant since the 16th century, show a lion with St. Olaf’s battle-axe in its forepaws. Those arms tell us that Olaf is a national hero to his countrymen as well as a saint in the calendar of the Church. (Read more.)

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The Jewel Tower

 

From Essential London:

The Jewel Tower is the sole remaining structure of the medieval Palace of Westminster, still easily accessible to the public on most days. Built for King Edward III in 1366, it was originally designed as the king’s private treasury before becoming a store for parliamentary records in 1600. A channel brought the river to it’s base (left main picture) providing moated security and fresh fish! It may not be as extensive as the Tower of London, but being only 100m from Big Ben it’s too good to miss! (Read more.)

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The Dutch Farmer Protests

 From The Federalist:

Americans should start paying closer attention to the ongoing farmer protests in the Netherlands, which this week transformed long swaths of Dutch highways into what looked like a post-apocalyptic warzone: roadside fires raging out of control, manure and farming detritus heaped across highways, traffic stalled for miles, and massive protests across the country in support of the farmers.

Why is the Netherlands, of all places, experiencing such unrest? Americans need to understand what’s happening over there because the ruinous climate policies that triggered these protests are precisely what President Joe Biden and the Democrats have in mind for the United States.

Specifically, Dutch farmers are protesting a government plan to cut fertilizer use and reduce livestock numbers so drastically that it will force many farms out of business. Earlier this month, farmers used tractors and trucks to block highways and entrances to food distribution centers across the country, saying their livelihood and way of life are being targeted by the government. (Read more.)

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The Shroud of Turin: A New Study

 From The European Conservative:

The study, soberly entitled “X-ray dating of a linen sample from the Shroud of Turin,” went relatively unnoticed when it was published on April 11th, 2022. However, its conclusions deserved accolades from the scientific community and beyond. A new analysis by Italian scientists of the Shroud of Turin using X-ray technology proves that the famous cloth dates back 2,000 years, contrary to the medieval origin suggested by the disputed 1988 carbon-14 analysis.

Until now, the carbon-14 dating carried out in 1988 dictated public opinion. At the time, many precautions had been taken to give the carbon experiment authority. Three independent laboratories, located in Zurich, (Switzerland), Oxford (UK), and Tucson (Arizona), had analysed fragments of the Shroud and had all come to the conclusion that the Shroud was a medieval forgery. 

However, within that same year, many voices were raised that objected to the method used in the testing, with a battery of different arguments. Carbon-14 dating, which is based on the radiological measurement of the carbon-14 naturally contained in organic matter, can be used to estimate the age of certain, very old artefacts or natural materials. It is commonly used in palaeontology or archaeology, but its relevance increases with the age of the object of study—ideally between 6,000 and 50,000 years. The technique was therefore not suitable for an object as recent—even assuming it was 2,000 years old—as the Shroud, and could only give an uncertain result, with a potential margin of error of several hundred years. Moreover, carbon-14 dating would not be able to rule out the many more recent foreign bodies that may have crept into the interstices of the cloth, and risk distorting the result. Another explanation was advanced saying the experiment was done on a latter fragment issued from a reparation of the original shroud. 

The X-ray dating technique used by the Italian scholars is a completely different and much more precise process. It involves analysing the Shroud at the level of atoms. The researcher will measure the natural ageing of the linen cellulose using X-rays, and then convert it into the time elapsed since manufacture. The results obtained from the Shroud were compared with those of other authenticated linen fabric samples, ranging in age from 3000 BC to 2000 AD. The measurements of the shroud were found to be particularly close to those of a linen fabric that historical records date back to the siege of Masada in Israel, between 55 and 74 AD. These results are therefore far from the medieval hypothesis put forward in 1988.

The X-ray technique offers a number of additional guarantees of reliability, explains Liberato De Caro, member of the research team, in an interview with the National Catholic Register. First, the sample required for the analysis is much smaller than that used for carbon-14 dating: 0.5 x 1 mm. The risk of finding exogenous particles is therefore considerably reduced. In addition, X-ray analysis can be carried out several times without damaging the support, whereas carbon-14 dating can only be done once per sample, which prevents any cross-checking in the event of doubt or error in the protocol.  (Read more.)

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