US Nord Stream Sabotage

 From The Post Millennial:

On Wednesday, the White House denied a report from journalist Seymour Hersh that claimed the September 26, 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline pumping natural gas from Russia to Europe was a deliberate act of sabotage orchestrated by the United States overseen and approved by Joe Biden. A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council, Adrienne Watson, said, "This is utterly false and complete fiction," Reuters reports.

The denial came in response to a report Hersh published to his substack revealing that Biden's National Security Adviser, Jake Sullivan, introduced the plan to take out two of the Nord Stream pipelines and that the administration committed themselves to destroy the pipelines as of December 2021. Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, months after the White House planned the sabotage, Hersh reports. (Read more.)

From Trending Politics:

The Northern Fleet warships regularly went to sea with nuclear weapons during the Cold War era, but this is the first time the modern Russian Federation has done the same, the report added. While Russia also has submarine capabilities, anti-satellite weapons and cyber capabilities that could threaten Norway and the NATO military alliance, tactical nuclear weapons are “a particularly serious threat in several operational scenarios in which NATO countries may be involved,” the report said. The Norwegian intelligence also noted that an escalation of a localized war into a wider conflict involving the Unites States, NATO and Norway cannot be ruled out. (Read more.)

 

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The Spiritual Testament of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI

 From Vatican News:

I thank my parents, who gave me life in difficult times and prepared a wonderful home for me with their love, which shines through all my days as a bright light until today. My father's clear-sighted faith taught us brothers and sisters to believe and stood firm as a guide in the midst of all my scientific knowledge; my mother's heartfelt piety and great kindness remain a legacy for which I cannot thank her enough. My sister has served me selflessly and full of kind concern for decades; my brother has always paved the way for me with the clear-sightedness of his judgements, with his powerful determination, and with the cheerfulness of his heart; without this ever-new going ahead and going along, I would not have been able to find the right path.

I thank God from the bottom of my heart for the many friends, men and women, whom He has always placed at my side; for the co-workers at all stages of my path; for the teachers and students He has given me. I gratefully entrust them all to His goodness. And I would like to thank the Lord for my beautiful home in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps, in which I was able to see the splendour of the Creator Himself shining through time and again. I thank the people of my homeland for allowing me to experience the beauty of faith time and again. I pray that our country will remain a country of faith and I ask you, dear compatriots, not to let your faith be distracted. Finally, I thank God for all the beauty I was able to experience during the various stages of my journey, but especially in Rome and in Italy, which has become my second home.

I ask for forgiveness from the bottom of my heart from all those whom I have wronged in some way. (Read more.)

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The Clintons Push ‘Digital Cash’

 Trying it out in India. From Slay:

According to a press release, a cryptocurrency organization called the Algorand Foundation will join forces with the Self Employed Women’s Association and the Clinton Global Initiative. They say the funds will be used to help “women micro-entrepreneurs address climate change” in India. Clinton made a speech recently to announce the massive partnership. The twice-failed Democrat presidential candidate says the fund will help fight climate change by addressing “extreme heat” and providing energy through solar panels. Clinton also confirmed that the partnership will include multiple Rockefeller organizations.

“Today, I’m proud to announce that the Clinton Global Initiative, started by my husband, will work closely with SEWA and with our partners the America-India Foundation, the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, the Desai Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Council for Inclusive Capitalism, and the Algorand Foundation to launch a $50 million Global Climate Resilience Fund for Women,” the former secretary of state said. “This fund will empower women and your communities to have access to resources that will make you resilient to the effects of climate change, like extreme heat,” she added. (Read more.)

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Facebook, Aquinas and the Sins Of Free Speech

 From John Clark at the National Catholic Register:

More than seven centuries ago, Saint Thomas Aquinas addressed this question in the Summa Theologiae in his entry on “Reviling,” which “denotes the dishonoring of a person” and occurs “when a man publishes something against another's honor.” Aquinas argues that “reviling is greater if one man reproach another in the presence of many.”

The Catechism of the Catholic Church echoes Aquinas, teaching that a public false statement about others, for instance, “takes on a particular gravity.” The logic is simple and sound: Private calumny speaks to those within earshot; public calumny speaks to the whole world.

These are often sins of objectively serious matter. As Thomas bluntly states, “reviling is a mortal sin.” In terms of gravity of evil, publicly posting libelous comments can rank alongside looking at pornography. It’s worth considering that fact before pressing “Post.”

Aquinas understood something that we have largely forgotten: these sins can have a serious and lasting imprint. A spoken word can be easily forgotten, but a printed word endures — sometimes permanently. (Read more.)

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Deciphering Mary Stuart’s Lost Letters from 1578-1584

 From Taylor and Francis Online:

Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots (1542–1587), has left an extensive corpus of letters held in various archive collections. There is evidence, however that other letters from Mary Stuart are missing from those collections, such as letters referenced in other sources but not found elsewhere. In Under the Molehill – an Elizabethan Spy Story, John Bossy writes that a secret correspondence with her associates and allies, prior to its compromise in mid-1583, was “kept so secure that none of it has survived, and we don’t know what was in it.” We have found over 55 letters fully in cipher in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which, after we broke the code and deciphered the letters, unexpectedly turned out to be letters from Mary Stuart, addressed mostly to Michel de Castelnau Mauvissière, the French ambassador to England. Written between 1578 and 1584, those newly deciphered letters are most likely part of the aforementioned secret correspondence considered to have been lost, and they constitute a voluminous body of new primary material on Mary Stuart – about 50,000 words in total, shedding new light on some of her years of captivity in England. (Read more.)

 

From The Independent:

Secret letters written by Mary Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I have finally been decoded. According to the codebreakers, the letters, which were feared to be lost for centuries, reveal fascinating insights into her captivity. Experts said the decoders’ work was the most significant discovery about Mary for 100 years. The letters date from 1578 to 1584, a few years before Mary’s beheading 436 years ago today – February 8th 1587. Key themes in the correspondence include complaints about her poor health and conditions in captivity, and her negotiations with Queen Elizabeth I for her release, which she believed were not conducted in good faith.

The 57 letters also express her distress when her son James (future King James I of England) is abducted in August 1582, her feeling they have been abandoned by France and her distrust of the queen’s spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, as well as her animosity towards Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and a favourite of Elizabeth. (Read more.)

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‘Detransitioners’ Are Being Abandoned By Medical Professionals

 This is utterly heartbreaking. Someone please help this poor girl. Everybody please pray. From The Federalist:

Now in debt and being rejected by one doctor after another, Prisha is at a loss for what to do. In an act of desperation, she turned to Plume, a company that has raised millions of dollars to connect patients with physicians who can prescribe them “gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy” online, including a “one-time medical letter of support for surgery with a one week turnaround time” for a fee of $150. But this time, instead of affirming her identity as the opposite sex, Prisha sought the help of Plume to get blood tests and hormone treatments to affirm her true sex: a woman. After paying $99 and scheduling an appointment with a provider, Prisha said she was “ghosted” 40 minutes before the appointment.

Plume hasn’t responded to Prisha’s requests for an explanation or even a refund. She suspects the provider canceled last minute because Prisha disclosed that she was “detrans” in initial paperwork she completed just minutes before the canceled appointment. After she submitted her intake forms, “All contact dropped off,” Prisha said. She then took to YouTube to share her devastation.

“I don’t know what to do, I don’t know who to go to because no one will help,” Prisha said through tears. “I was really hoping that they would care about me and help me. I just want to feel better. I just want to be better. I don’t want my body to be like this anymore. I’m in pain. … I can’t take it anymore.” (Read more.)

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Everything Begins in Mysticism

 From Robert Royal at The Catholic Thing:

Long before the term “political correctness” became a media shibboleth, for instance, Péguy noted how certain attitudes were becoming obligatory at political demonstrations: “If you don’t take that line you don’t look sufficiently progressive. . .and it will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of looking insufficiently progressive.”

Coming from a young socialist – until he experienced being “canceled” (avant la lettre)  by the party’s nomenklatura – this reflects the unwavering honesty and decency of a man who refused to lie just because it reflected badly on his own party. He paid the price: poverty (a heavy burden for someone with a wife and four children) and marginalization by former friends.

This all occurred over the closing of Catholic schools and monasteries by the anti-Catholic French President Émile Combes, in theory because of the Church’s role in the Dreyfus Affair. Péguy was not a Catholic at the time, but it was simply clear to him that the injustice against Dreyfus (a false charge of treason) didn’t justify another injustice – against Catholics.

His most famous words are particularly relevant to our current situation: “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” (Tout commence en mystique et finit en politique.) What he meant is that every powerful movement begins as a spiritual force, and then is “incarnated” in concrete action. This already reveals a rare depth of heart, especially in public affairs: the France of Péguy’s day was divided, much as we are, between conservatives and progressives. But he recognized related ideals – mystiques – in the best republicans and Catholics.  

Few know the warning, however, that immediately follows: “The interest, the question, the essential is that in each order, in each system, the mysticism not be devoured by the politics to which it gave birth.” Many politicians privately mock this sort of idealism – either regarding it as impractical or using it for personal or partisan purposes. But, says Péguy, it’s the mystique that provides whatever real life there may be in public affairs. And it’s the mystique that’s really practical, that gets something done.

Public life becomes fruitless – and sterile – owing to the practical atheism of all the parties, “the world of those who have no mysticism and boast of it.” In that perspective, the two camps suffer from the same disease: “The movement for de-republicanizing France is profoundly the same movement as the movement which de-Christianized her.”

It took some time to arrive on our shores, but it’s clear that in America, too, we’ve reached a point where the abandoning of our religious traditions threatens our political order, and vice versa.

But Péguy’s work extends far beyond politics. He’s a sort of French Chesterton, throwing off lines of great penetration seemingly without effort:

• Kantianism has clean hands because it has no hands.
• Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.
• Homer is still new this morning, and nothing perhaps is as old as today’s newspaper.

(Read more.)

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Ideas for Children's Rooms

 

From House and Garden:

When it comes to buying furniture for your little one's room, it’s probably best to choose sturdier, more enduring options. Kids will climb and clamber about, paying little attention to delicate objects around them. However, there are still some ways to incorporate antiques in your child's room–as Rita says, “you are not wasting good things on children, but starting their collections and developing their taste. I think it really pays dividends.”

As for the bed, think ahead. Children grow quickly, so that sweet tyke-sized bed made of the finest Bahamian lignum vitae simply isn't worth the investment if they can't fit into it in two years' time. Practicality, too, is key: a pink princess bed can always be re-painted, but a custom-built bed shaped like a sailboat is far less adaptable. Bunk beds are a great option for siblings sharing a room or for hosting fabulous slumber parties. Lofted beds are a chic, modern option ­ and help to free up space to accommodate a desk or dresser in tinier rooms. Choosing a full-sized bed, too, is an excellent and practical choice; larger beds will carry your child well into their teenage years and, once they leave the nest, grant you the opportunity to ready the room for guests. (Read more.)

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Barometer of Hate

 From Heather MacDonald at City Journal:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibit whose curatorial philosophy, were it widely adopted, would spell the end of art and of art museums. The art press greeted the show ecstatically, as a sign of the Met’s new direction. This prognosis is undoubtedly correct. Fictions of Emancipation (on view through March 5, 2023) is built around an 1873 sculpture by the brilliant French sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. The marble bust, titled Why Born Enslaved!, portrays a black woman, bound by a rope, looking over her left shoulder with a piercing expression of defiance, incredulity, and contempt.

Why Born Enslaved! has been understood since its creation as an antislavery work. The Met, however, knows better, now that it has been reborn as an “antiracist” institution. Fictions of Emancipation argues that the Carpeaux bust furthers whites’ ongoing “domination over Black people’s bodies,” in the words of the exhibit’s curators. And Carpeaux was not the only artist to give an aesthetic gloss to racial oppression, while seeming to oppose it—Fictions of Emancipation portrays abolitionist art more widely as a fig leaf for Western colonialism and white supremacy.

Arriving at this reading of the Carpeaux statue and of similarly themed works requires the deconstruction of virtually every aspect of artistic creation. An artist’s use of live models, the representation of the nude, the selling and buying of art—all are revealed by the Met as ploys used by a white European power structure to oppress nonwhite people.

The Met’s first engagements with Why Born Enslaved! provided no hint of the revisionist readings to come. In 1997, a donor gave the museum a terra-cotta version of the bust, dating from 1872. In announcing the gift, the Met described Carpeaux as a “liberal romantic” whose “humanitarian sentiments” were manifest in the museum’s new sculpture. The museum was still in the business of stylistic explication rather than ideological denunciation, so it noted the influence of Carpeaux’s most important master in the bust’s “Michelangelesque sideward turn.”

In 2014, the Met assembled a magisterial Carpeaux retrospective, introducing many Americans to this stunningly gifted artist for the first time. The show, The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, included some of Carpeaux’s most psychologically acute busts, along with his tormented self-portraits and flamboyantly kinetic paintings. It traced the artist’s hard-fought rise, from son of a stonemason in provincial northern France to premier sculptor of the Second Empire. Carpeaux’s fountains, pediments, and bas-reliefs contributed exuberant beauty to the public-works projects then transforming Paris. (Why Born Enslaved! was an offshoot of one of those commissions, for the Fountain of the Observatory in the Luxembourg Gardens.) The exhibit also marked Carpeaux’s harrowing end, dying in agony at 48 after a botched cancer operation pierced his bladder.

The 2014 show displayed the Met’s terra-cotta version of Why Born Enslaved! Even in 2014, the museum could still discuss the work in sympathetic terms. The bust’s early success was due to the “beauty of the woman’s expression and the powerful emotion to which it gives rise,” the catalog suggested. Art historian Laure de Margerie wrote in a catalog essay that the bust “partook of the prolonged enthusiasm generated by the abolition of slavery in France in 1848 and in the United States in 1865.”

In 2019, the Met bought the marble version of Why Born Enslaved!. The acquisition announcement revealed how much had changed in the museum’s curatorial philosophy. The announcement warned future viewers about patriarchy and white privilege: “It is critical to reckon with the power imbalance enacted when a white male artist transposes the body of a black woman into an emblem of enslavement.” Though the statue had heretofore been interpreted (including by the Met) as “an expression of Carpeaux’s stance against slavery,” the museum was no longer taken in. In fact, the bust was a “disturbing fantasy of aestheticized bondage—the transformation of human carnage into erotically-charged drama,” the acquisition announcement explained. (Read more.)

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